The Three Sides of the Moon LLMs in Cybersecurity: Guardians, Enablers and Targets
Fiammetta Marulli, Pierluigi Paganini, Fabio Lancellotti · Procedia Computer Science · 2024
Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving, demonstrating impressive capabilities in multimedia objects generation, ranging from text and image generation from scratch to programming code and efficient conversational agents. From the perspective of cyber-security challenges, LLMs and cyber-security are in a controversial relationship: it can be observed that LLMs, as a type of AI, play a mainfold role: that of security guardians, that of security breachs ”unaware” enablers and that of victims of cyber attacks. In fact, LLMs are able to enhance security of several tasks and applications but they are also attractive for malicious users to be exploited as means to perform novel attacks and, finally they represent challenging assets for targeting attacks. In this work, we discuss this mainfold key reading by providing a brief landscape of both the current defence applications of LLMs against cyber attacks and the currently known LLMs security vulnerabilities along with potential cyber-attacks targeting and involving LLMs. The final aim of study is intended to provide a guideline to further explore specific cyber-security scenarios involving LLMs.