Experimenting with Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence for Defending Against Cyber Attacks

It is generally accepted that all cyber attacks can not be prevented, and it is therefore necessary to have the ability to detect and respond to cyber attacks. Both connectionist and symbolic approaches are currently being employed for this purpose, but far less work has been done on the intersection of the two. This paper argues that the cyber security domain holds significant potential for applying neurosymbolic artificial intelligence (AI). We identify a set of challenges faced in cyber security today, and from this, we propose a set of neurosymbolic use cases that can help address the challenges. Feasibility is demonstrated through multiple experiments that apply neurosymbolic AI to cyber security. We find a significant overlap between the challenges in cyber security and the promises of neurosymbolic techniques, making it an interesting research direction for both the neurosymbolic AI and cyber security communities. This paper is an extended version of a paper published at the NeSy 2024 conference ( Grov et al., 2024 ). The main additional contributions are further experimental evidence for our hypothesis that NeSy offers real benefits in this domain and a more in-depth treatment of knowledge graphs for cyber security.