GPT-2C: A GPT-2 parser for Cowrie honeypot logs

Abstract—Deception technologies like honeypots produce comprehensive log reports, but often lack interoperability with EDR and SIEM technologies. A key bottleneck is that existing information transformation plugins perform well on static logs (e.g. eolocation), but face limitations when it comes to parsing dynamic log topics (e.g. user-generated content). In this paper, we present a run-time system (GPT-2C) that leverages large pre-trained models (GPT-2) to parse dynamic logs generate by a Cowrie SSH oneypot. Our fine-tuned model achieves 89% inference accuracy in the new domain and demonstrates acceptable execution latency.

Index Terms—Cowrie, parser, logs, honeypots, GPT-2, language models, Question Answering