arXiv subjects

Guo-Wei Wong

Publications and source records attributed to Guo-Wei Wong.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

TGCM: Topic-Guided Consistency Modeling for One-Step Disentanglement of Interleaved APT Technique Sequences

Multiple Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) campaigns may execute concurrently, producing audit logs whose events are interleaved without explicit campaign boundaries. We formulate this setting as Unknown-K Interleaved Sequence Demixing (UKISD): recovering coherent campaign episodes when the number of concurrent campaigns is unknown. Each episode is represented as a sequence of MITRE ATT&CK technique occurrences, and demixing is cast as occurrence-level assignment with sequence reconstruction. Existing methods often assume single-campaign observations or rely on local heuristics, limiting robustness to severe interleaving, repeated techniques, abstraction noise, and unknown mixture cardinality. We propose Topic-Guided Consistency Modeling (TGCM), a consistency-inspired one-step framework for UKISD. TGCM maps an interleaved technique sequence to campaign episodes, jointly performing occurrence assignment and sequence reconstruction in one forward pass. It combines topic guidance from ATT&CK narratives with an embedding-space self-consistency objective to improve semantic coherence and retain efficient inference. We evaluate TGCM on synthetic mixtures, mixed benchmarks, DARPA engagement traces, and CAPTure, an end-to-end benchmark containing 200 scenarios, 855 million audit events, and 25 ATT&CK-aligned attack profiles in single-host and multi-host settings. TGCM improves occurrence-level assignment under heavy interleaving, repeated technique reuse, symbolic extraction errors, and budgeted unknown-K inference. It also generalizes to unseen benchmarks without retraining and remains effective with practical ATT&CK extraction pipelines. These results establish TGCM as a practical post-abstraction framework for reasoning about concurrent APT campaigns. Code and artifacts are available at https://irish-kw.github.io/TGCM_Website/.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

SAGA: Synthetic Audit Log Generation for APT Campaigns

With the increasing sophistication of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), the demand for effective detection and mitigation strategies and methods has escalated. Program execution leaves traces in the system audit log, which can be analyzed to detect malicious activities. However, collecting and analyzing large volumes of audit logs over extended periods is challenging, further compounded by insufficient labeling that hinders their usability. Addressing these challenges, this paper introduces SAGA (Synthetic Audit log Generation for APT campaigns), a novel approach for generating find-grained labeled synthetic audit logs that mimic real-world system logs while embedding stealthy APT attacks. SAGA generates configurable audit logs for arbitrary duration, blending benign logs from normal operations with malicious logs based on the definitions the MITRE ATT\&CK framework. Malicious audit logs follow an APT lifecycle, incorporating various attack techniques at each stage. These synthetic logs can serve as benchmark datasets for training machine learning models and assessing diverse APT detection methods. To demonstrate the usefulness of synthetic audit logs, we ran established baselines of event-based technique hunting and APT campaign detection using various synthetic audit logs. In addition, we show that a deep learning model trained on synthetic audit logs can detect previously unseen techniques within audit logs.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

A Cascade Approach for APT Campaign Attribution in System Event Logs: Technique Hunting and Subgraph Matching

As Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) grow increasingly sophisticated, the demand for effective detection methods has intensified. This study addresses the challenge of identifying APT campaign attacks through system event logs. A cascading approach, name SFM, combines Technique hunting and APT campaign attribution. Our approach assumes that real-world system event logs contain a vast majority of normal events interspersed with few suspiciously malicious ones and that these logs are annotated with Techniques of MITRE ATT&CK framework for attack pattern recognition. Then, we attribute APT campaign attacks by aligning detected Techniques with known attack sequences to determine the most likely APT campaign. Evaluations on five real-world APT campaigns indicate that the proposed approach demonstrates reliable performance.

cs.CR↗