Work

IoT Vulnerability Severity Prediction Using Lightweight Transformer Models

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Vulnerability severity assessment plays a critical role in cybersecurity risk management by quantifying risk based on vulnerability disclosure reports. However, interpreting these reports and assigning reliable risk levels remains challenging in Internet of Things (IoT) environments. This paper proposes an IoT vulnerability severity prediction framework aligned with the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). The framework is based on a lightweight transformer architecture. It uses a distilled version of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). The model is fine-tuned using transfer learning to capture contextual semantic information from vulnerability descriptions. The lightweight design preserves computational efficiency. Experimental evaluation on an IoT vulnerability dataset shows strong and consistent performance across all severity classes. The proposed model achieves double-digit improvements across key evaluation metrics. In most cases, the improvement exceeds 20% compared with traditional machine learning and baseline deep learning approaches. These results show that lightweight transformer models are well suited for IoT security. They provide a practical and effective solution for automated vulnerability severity classification in resource- and data-constrained environments.

Source: Journal of Cybersecurity and Privacy

DOI: 10.3390/jcp6010036

Authors: Samira A. Baho, Jemal Abawajy

Institution: Deakin University

Language: English

Topic: Network Security and Intrusion Detection

Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $1,207