Security-First Evaluation of Text-to-Terraform: Benchmarking LLMs and SLMs for Secure IaC Generation
Cloud misconfiguration remains a leading cause of security incidents, yet whether LLMs and SLMs can generate security-compliant Infrastructure-as-Code is an open question. We benchmark seven models, three closed LLMs (Claude Opus 4, GPT-5.4, Gemini 2.5 Pro) and four open SLMs (Qwen2.5-Coder-14B, WizardCoder-33B, CodeLlama-13B, Magicoder-S-CL-7B), on AWS Terraform generation across 17 scenarios, integrating Checkov and Trivy scanners into a GitLab CI/CD pipeline and evaluating two prompt strategies at three security levels (pass@5). Syntactic validity and security compliance are largely orthogonal properties in LLM-generated IaC, a model that reliably produces well-formed Terraform does no...
| Authors | Francis Luis Santos Vargas, Rodrigo Brandão Mansilha, Diego Kreutz |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 2 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 August 2026 |
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