APT-CGLP: Advanced Persistent Threat Hunting via Contrastive Graph-Language Pre-Training

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Main Authors: Qiu, Xuebo, Lv, Mingqi, Zhang, Yimei, Chen, Tieming, Zhu, Tiantian, Song, Qijie, Ji, Shouling
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Qiu, Xuebo
Lv, Mingqi
Zhang, Yimei
Chen, Tieming
Zhu, Tiantian
Song, Qijie
Ji, Shouling
author_facet Qiu, Xuebo
Lv, Mingqi
Zhang, Yimei
Chen, Tieming
Zhu, Tiantian
Song, Qijie
Ji, Shouling
contents Provenance-based threat hunting identifies Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) on endpoints by correlating attack patterns described in Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) with provenance graphs derived from system audit logs. A fundamental challenge in this paradigm lies in the modality gap -- the structural and semantic disconnect between provenance graphs and CTI reports. Prior work addresses this by framing threat hunting as a graph matching task: 1) extracting attack graphs from CTI reports, and 2) aligning them with provenance graphs. However, this pipeline incurs severe \textit{information loss} during graph extraction and demands intensive manual curation, undermining scalability and effectiveness. In this paper, we present APT-CGLP, a novel cross-modal APT hunting system via Contrastive Graph-Language Pre-training, facilitating end-to-end semantic matching between provenance graphs and CTI reports without human intervention. First, empowered by the Large Language Model (LLM), APT-CGLP mitigates data scarcity by synthesizing high-fidelity provenance graph-CTI report pairs, while simultaneously distilling actionable insights from noisy web-sourced CTIs to improve their operational utility. Second, APT-CGLP incorporates a tailored multi-objective training algorithm that synergizes contrastive learning with inter-modal masked modeling, promoting cross-modal attack semantic alignment at both coarse- and fine-grained levels. Extensive experiments on four real-world APT datasets demonstrate that APT-CGLP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art threat hunting baselines in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle APT-CGLP: Advanced Persistent Threat Hunting via Contrastive Graph-Language Pre-Training
Qiu, Xuebo
Lv, Mingqi
Zhang, Yimei
Chen, Tieming
Zhu, Tiantian
Song, Qijie
Ji, Shouling
Cryptography and Security
Provenance-based threat hunting identifies Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) on endpoints by correlating attack patterns described in Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) with provenance graphs derived from system audit logs. A fundamental challenge in this paradigm lies in the modality gap -- the structural and semantic disconnect between provenance graphs and CTI reports. Prior work addresses this by framing threat hunting as a graph matching task: 1) extracting attack graphs from CTI reports, and 2) aligning them with provenance graphs. However, this pipeline incurs severe \textit{information loss} during graph extraction and demands intensive manual curation, undermining scalability and effectiveness. In this paper, we present APT-CGLP, a novel cross-modal APT hunting system via Contrastive Graph-Language Pre-training, facilitating end-to-end semantic matching between provenance graphs and CTI reports without human intervention. First, empowered by the Large Language Model (LLM), APT-CGLP mitigates data scarcity by synthesizing high-fidelity provenance graph-CTI report pairs, while simultaneously distilling actionable insights from noisy web-sourced CTIs to improve their operational utility. Second, APT-CGLP incorporates a tailored multi-objective training algorithm that synergizes contrastive learning with inter-modal masked modeling, promoting cross-modal attack semantic alignment at both coarse- and fine-grained levels. Extensive experiments on four real-world APT datasets demonstrate that APT-CGLP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art threat hunting baselines in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
title APT-CGLP: Advanced Persistent Threat Hunting via Contrastive Graph-Language Pre-Training
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20290