A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Cyber Defences: Opportunities and Directions

TL;DR

This paper surveys the recent use of Large Language Models in cyber defense, highlighting their capabilities, applications, challenges, and future research directions in enhancing cybersecurity measures.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview and categorization of LLM applications in cyber security, along with analysis of their strengths, weaknesses, and future challenges.

Findings

LLMs can effectively identify cyber threats and automate security tasks.

Current LLM applications face challenges like ethical concerns and technical limitations.

Future research should focus on addressing these challenges and expanding LLM capabilities in cybersecurity.

Abstract

The recent progression of Large Language Models (LLMs) has witnessed great success in the fields of data-centric applications. LLMs trained on massive textual datasets showed ability to encode not only context but also ability to provide powerful comprehension to downstream tasks. Interestingly, Generative Pre-trained Transformers utilised this ability to bring AI a step closer to human being replacement in at least datacentric applications. Such power can be leveraged to identify anomalies of cyber threats, enhance incident response, and automate routine security operations. We provide an overview for the recent activities of LLMs in cyber defence sections, as well as categorization for the cyber defence sections such as threat intelligence, vulnerability assessment, network security, privacy preserving, awareness and training, automation, and ethical guidelines. Fundamental concepts of the progression of LLMs from Transformers, Pre-trained Transformers, and GPT is presented. Next, the recent works of each section is surveyed with the related strengths and weaknesses. A special section about the challenges and directions of LLMs in cyber security is provided. Finally, possible future research directions for benefiting from LLMs in cyber security is discussed.