Situation, Trends and Prospects of Deep Learning Applied to Cyberspace Security

Recently, research on deep learning applied to cyberspace security has caused increasing academic concern, and this survey analyzes the current research situation and trends of deep learning applied to cyberspace security in terms of classification algorithms, feature extraction and learning performance. Currently deep learning is mainly applied to malware detection and intrusion detection, and this survey reveals the existing problems of these applications: feature selection, which could be achieved by extracting features from raw data; self-adaptability, achieved by early-exit strategy to update the model in real time; interpretability, achieved by influence functions to obtain the correspondence between features and classification labels. Then, top 10 obstacles and opportunities in deep learning research are summarized. Based on this, top 10 obstacles and opportunities of deep learning applied to cyberspace security are at first proposed, which falls into three categories. The first category is intrinsic vulnerabilities of deep learning to adversarial attacks and privacy-theft attacks. The second category is sequence-model related problems, including program syntax analysis, program code generation and long-term dependences in sequence modeling. The third category is learning performance problems, including poor interpretability and traceability, poor self-adaptability and self-learning ability, false positives and data unbalance. Main obstacles and their opportunities among the top 10 are analyzed, and we also point out that applications using classification models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks and the most effective solution is adversarial training; collaborative deep learning applications are vulnerable to privacy-theft attacks, and prospective defense is teacher-student model. Finally, future research trends of deep learning applied to cyberspace security are introduced.