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.

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