The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened up new
opportunities for leveraging artificial intelligence in a variety of
application domains, including cybersecurity. As the volume and sophistication
of cyber threats continue to grow, there is an increasing need for intelligent
systems that can automatically detect vulnerabilities, analyze malware, and
respond to attacks. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the
literature on the application of LLMs in cybersecurity~(LLM4Security). By
comprehensively collecting over 40K relevant papers and systematically
analyzing 185 papers from top security and software engineering venues, we aim
to provide a holistic view of how LLMs are being used to solve diverse problems
across the cybersecurity domain. Through our analysis, we identify several key
findings. First, we observe that LLMs are being applied to an expanding range
of cybersecurity tasks, including vulnerability detection, malware analysis,
and network intrusion detection. Second, we analyze application trends of
different LLM architectures (such as encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and
decoder-only) across security domains. Third, we identify increasingly
sophisticated techniques for adapting LLMs to cybersecurity, such as advanced
fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and external augmentation strategies. A
significant emerging trend is the use of LLM-based autonomous agents, which
represent a paradigm shift from single-task execution to orchestrating complex,
multi-step security workflows.