Artificial intelligence in cyber security: research advances, challenges, and opportunities

In recent times, there have been attempts to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in a broad range of cyber security applications. Therefore, this paper surveys the existing literature (comprising 54 papers mainly published between 2016 and 2020) on the applications of AI in user access authentication, network situation awareness, dangerous behavior monitoring, and abnormal traffic identification. This paper also identifies a number of limitations and challenges, and based on the findings, a conceptual human-in-the-loop intelligence cyber security model is presented.