On the use of neurosymbolic AI for defending against cyber attacks

TL;DR

This paper advocates for combining connectionist and symbolic AI into neurosymbolic AI to improve cyber attack detection and response, highlighting challenges, proposing use cases, and demonstrating feasibility with proof-of-concept experiments.

Contribution

It introduces neurosymbolic AI as a promising approach for cybersecurity, outlining key challenges, potential use cases, and providing initial experimental validation.

Findings

Feasibility of neurosymbolic AI in cybersecurity demonstrated

Identified key challenges in applying AI to cyber defense

Proposed promising research directions for neurosymbolic AI in security

Abstract

It is generally accepted that all cyber attacks cannot be prevented, creating a need for the ability to detect and respond to cyber attacks. Both connectionist and symbolic AI are currently being used to support such detection and response. In this paper, we make the case for combining them using neurosymbolic AI. We identify a set of challenges when using AI today and propose a set of neurosymbolic use cases we believe are both interesting research directions for the neurosymbolic AI community and can have an impact on the cyber security field. We demonstrate feasibility through two proof-of-concept experiments.