The Dual Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity: A Survey from Deepfake Attacks to Intelligent Defense

Abstract

The rapid iteration of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the cybersecurity offense-defense landscape. This paper systematically reviews research progress in this field from 2021 to 2026, focusing on the dual use of generative AI in cybersecurity. On the one hand, malicious actors exploit generative AI to create deepfake content, automate phishing emails, and conduct social engineering attacks, significantly improving the personalization and scalability of attacks. On the other hand, the same technological system demonstrates significant effectiveness in defense scenarios such as threat detection, vulnerability remediation, data augmentation, and security knowledge management. Existing reviews often treat attack and defense separately, lacking an integrated analytical framework. This paper analyzes the field from four dimensions: attack surface expansion, defense technology evolution, governance frameworks, and evaluation benchmarks. We first review generative AI-driven cyberattacks, covering deepfake attacks, automated phishing, automated malware development, and intelligent social engineering. We then examine defense applications, including intelligent threat detection, data augmentation and class imbalance handling, vulnerability detection and automated remediation, security knowledge management, and security education. Next, we identify key shortcomings in current research regarding adversarial robustness, privacy protection, interpretability, and deployment constraints. We further outline five future research directions: adaptive defense and adversarial robustness, federated learning and privacy protection, interpretability and human-machine collaboration, interdisciplinary governance frameworks, and multimodal security evaluation benchmarks. This review aims to provide a structured reference for building adaptive defense systems and interdisciplinary governance paths in the era of generative AI.