  Machine learning has a long tradition of helping to solve complex information
security problems that are difficult to solve manually. Machine learning
techniques learn models from data representations to solve a task. These data
representations are hand-crafted by domain experts. Deep Learning is a
sub-field of machine learning, which uses models that are composed of multiple
layers. Consequently, representations that are used to solve a task are learned
from the data instead of being manually designed.
  In this survey, we study the use of DL techniques within the domain of
information security. We systematically reviewed 77 papers and presented them
from a data-centric perspective. This data-centric perspective reflects one of
the most crucial advantages of DL techniques -- domain independence. If
DL-methods succeed to solve problems on a data type in one domain, they most
likely will also succeed on similar data from another domain. Other advantages
of DL methods are unrivaled scalability and efficiency, both regarding the
number of examples that can be analyzed as well as with respect of
dimensionality of the input data. DL methods generally are capable of achieving
high-performance and generalize well.
  However, information security is a domain with unique requirements and
challenges. Based on an analysis of our reviewed papers, we point out
shortcomings of DL-methods to those requirements and discuss further research
opportunities.
