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Detecting APT-Exploited Processes through Semantic Fusion and Interaction Prediction

Bin Luo1,2,3, Liangguo Chen1,2,3, Shuhua Ruan1,2,3,*, Yonggang Luo2,3,*

1 School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China
2 Key Laboratory of Data Protection and Intelligent Management (Sichuan University), Ministry of Education, Chengdu, 610065, China
3 Cyber Science Research Institute, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China

* Corresponding Authors: Shuhua Ruan. Email: email; Yonggang Luo. Email: email

Computers, Materials & Continua 2024, 78(2), 1731-1754. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2023.045739

Abstract

Considering the stealthiness and persistence of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), system audit logs are leveraged in recent studies to construct system entity interaction provenance graphs to unveil threats in a host. Rule-based provenance graph APT detection approaches require elaborate rules and cannot detect unknown attacks, and existing learning-based approaches are limited by the lack of available APT attack samples or generally only perform graph-level anomaly detection, which requires lots of manual efforts to locate attack entities. This paper proposes an APT-exploited process detection approach called ThreatSniffer, which constructs the benign provenance graph from attack-free audit logs, fits normal system entity interactions and then detects APT-exploited processes by predicting the rationality of entity interactions. Firstly, ThreatSniffer understands system entities in terms of their file paths, interaction sequences, and the number distribution of interaction types and uses the multi-head self-attention mechanism to fuse these semantics. Then, based on the insight that APT-exploited processes interact with system entities they should not invoke, ThreatSniffer performs negative sampling on the benign provenance graph to generate non-existent edges, thus characterizing irrational entity interactions without requiring APT attack samples. At last, it employs a heterogeneous graph neural network as the interaction prediction model to aggregate the contextual information of entity interactions, and locate processes exploited by attackers, thereby achieving fine-grained APT detection. Evaluation results demonstrate that anomaly-based detection enables ThreatSniffer to identify all attack activities. Compared to the node-level APT detection method APT-KGL, ThreatSniffer achieves a 6.1% precision improvement because of its comprehensive understanding of entity semantics.

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APA Style
Luo, B., Chen, L., Ruan, S., Luo, Y. (2024). Detecting apt-exploited processes through semantic fusion and interaction prediction. Computers, Materials & Continua, 78(2), 1731-1754. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2023.045739
Vancouver Style
Luo B, Chen L, Ruan S, Luo Y. Detecting apt-exploited processes through semantic fusion and interaction prediction. Comput Mater Contin. 2024;78(2):1731-1754 https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2023.045739
IEEE Style
B. Luo, L. Chen, S. Ruan, and Y. Luo "Detecting APT-Exploited Processes through Semantic Fusion and Interaction Prediction," Comput. Mater. Contin., vol. 78, no. 2, pp. 1731-1754. 2024. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2023.045739



cc Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Tech Science Press.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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