arXiv AI

Reasoning Topology Matters: A Controlled Study of LLM-Based Cybersecurity Analysis

arXiv AI
Aug 24

Structured but Fragile: On the Limits of LLMs in Cybersecurity Decision-Making

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can perform structured security reasoning in cybersecurity decision-making. By testing LLMs on defense selection over attack graphs from real-world threat scenarios, the study finds that LLMs can produce coherent strategies when the attack-graph structure is explicitly provided, yet their performance is fragile, highly sensitive to prompt framing, and deteriorates with increasing graph complexity. Additionally, LLM-generated solvers recover the correct high-level formulation but scale poorly compared to specialized solvers.

By Pasquale Malacaria, Yunxiao Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 2

Toward Cybersecurity-Expert Small Language Models

arXiv:2510. 14113v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are transforming everyday applications, yet deployment in cybersecurity lags due to a lack of high-quality, domain-specific models and training datasets.

By Matan Levi, Daniel Ohayon, Ariel Blobstein, Ravid Sagi, Ian Molloy, Yair Allouche
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Cybersecurity Detection Classification with Reasoning-enabled Language Models

arXiv:2607. 28460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A major issue in Security Operations Centers (SOCs) is alert fatigue, as the number of detections reported is more than staff can triage in a given day.

By Amol Khanna, Manu Nandan, Cristian Viorel Popa, Joan Pujol-Roig, Diana Bolocan, Laura Vasilie, Alexandru Apostu, Chase Helwig, Mihaela Gaman, Michael Brautbar, Edward Raff, Chase Midler, Sven Krasser
arXiv AI
Jun 17

Like a Hammer, It Can Build, It Can Break: Large Language Model Uses, Perceptions, and Adoption in Cybersecurity Operations on Reddit

arXiv:2604. 09998v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as promising tools for augmenting Security Operations Center (SOC) workflows, with vendors increasingly marketing autonomous AI solutions for SOCs.

By Souradip Nath, Chih-Yi Huang, Aditi Ganapathi, Kashyap Thimmaraju, Jaron Mink, Gail-Joon Ahn
arXiv AI
Jul 9

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI in Cybersecurity and Privacy: A Survey of Dual-Use Risks, AI-Generated Malware, Explainability, and Defensive Strategies

arXiv:2607. 06963v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI (GenAI) systems, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA, Copilot, Stable Diffusion by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Stability AI, respectively, are revolutionizing cybersecurity, enabling both automated defense and sophisticated attacks.

By Kiarash Ahi, Saeed Valizadeh
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

OverThink: Slowdown Attacks on Reasoning LLMs

The paper introduces OverThink, a slowdown attack that forces reasoning language models (RLMs) to produce many more reasoning tokens while still giving correct answers. By injecting decoy reasoning problems—such as Markov decision processes, language translation, or graphic comprehension—into the model’s context, attackers can dramatically increase token generation (up to 46× on SQuAD and 17× on coding agents). The study evaluates the attack on both proprietary and open-source RLMs across multiple datasets, explores multimodal and coding‑agent variants, and tests several defenses, concluding that defending against OverThink is challenging and that newer RLMs are even more vulnerable due to higher per‑token costs and increased reasoning token usage.

By Abhinav Kumar, Jaechul Roh, Ali Naseh, Marzena Karpinska, Mohit Iyyer, Amir Houmansadr, Eugene Bagdasarian
arXiv AI
Jul 7

SoK: Systematizing LLM Prompt Security: Taxonomies, Datasets, and Unified Evaluation of Attacks and Defenses

arXiv:2510. 15476v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as interfaces to information, code, and real-world services, making prompt-level security failures a practical concern.

By Hanbin Hong, Shuang Wu, Shuya Feng, Nima Naderloui, Shenao Yan, Jingyu Zhang, Ali Arastehfard, Heqing Huang, Yuan Hong
arXiv AI
Jul 3

Less Data, More Security: Advancing Cybersecurity LLMs Specialization via Resource-Efficient Domain-Adaptive Continuous Pre-training with Minimal Tokens

arXiv:2507. 02964v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The increasing scale of AI workloads demands High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure and training methodologies that are both scalable and sustainable.

By Salahuddin Salahuddin, Ahmed Hussain, Jussi L\"opp\"onen, Toni Jutila