arXiv subjects

Qijie Song

Publications and source records attributed to Qijie Song.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

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

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.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Doctor: Optimizing Container Rebuild Efficiency by Instruction Re-Orchestration

Containerization has revolutionized software deployment, with Docker leading the way due to its ease of use and consistent runtime environment. As Docker usage grows, optimizing Dockerfile performance, particularly by reducing rebuild time, has become essential for maintaining efficient CI/CD pipelines. However, existing optimization approaches primarily address single builds without considering the recurring rebuild costs associated with modifications and evolution, limiting long-term efficiency gains. To bridge this gap, we present Doctor, a method for improving Dockerfile build efficiency through instruction re-ordering that addresses key challenges: identifying instruction dependencies, predicting future modifications, ensuring behavioral equivalence, and managing the optimization computational complexity. We developed a comprehensive dependency taxonomy based on Dockerfile syntax and a historical modification analysis to prioritize frequently modified instructions. Using a weighted topological sorting algorithm, Doctor optimizes instruction order to minimize future rebuild time while maintaining functionality. Experiments on 2,000 GitHub repositories show that Doctor improves 92.75% of Dockerfiles, reducing rebuild time by an average of 26.5%, with 12.82% of files achieving over a 50% reduction. Notably, 86.2% of cases preserve functional similarity. These findings highlight best practices for Dockerfile management, enabling developers to enhance Docker efficiency through informed optimization strategies.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Kellect: a Kernel-Based Efficient and Lossless Event Log Collector for Windows Security

Recently, APT attacks have frequently happened, which are increasingly complicated and more challenging for traditional security detection models. The system logs are vital for cyber security analysis mainly due to their effective reconstruction ability of system behavior. existing log collection tools built on ETW for Windows suffer from working shortages, including data loss, high overhead, and weak real-time performance. Therefore, It is still very difficult to apply ETW-based Windows tools to analyze APT attack scenarios. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an efficient and lossless kernel log collector called Kellect, which has open sourced with project at www.kellect.org. It takes extra CPU usage with only 2%-3% and about 40MB memory consumption, by dynamically optimizing the number of cache and processing threads through a multi-level cache solution. By replacing the TDH library with a sliding pointer, Kellect enhances analysis performance, achieving at least 9 times the efficiency of existing tools. Furthermore, Kellect improves compatibility with different OS versions. Additionally, Kellect enhances log semantics understanding by maintaining event mappings and application callstacks which provide more comprehensive characteristics for security behavior analysis. With plenty of experiments, Kellect demonstrates its capability to achieve non-destructive, real-time and full collection of kernel log data generated from events with a comprehensive efficiency of 9 times greater than existing tools. As a killer illustration to show how Kellect can work for APT, full data logs have been collected as a dataset Kellect4APT, generated by implementing TTPs from the latest ATT&CK. To our knowledge, it is the first open benchmark dataset representing ATT&CK technique-specific behaviors, which could be highly expected to improve more extensive research on APT study.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

A Heterogeneous Graph Learning Model for Cyber-Attack Detection

A cyber-attack is a malicious attempt by experienced hackers to breach the target information system. Usually, the cyber-attacks are characterized as hybrid TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) and long-term adversarial behaviors, making the traditional intrusion detection methods ineffective. Most existing cyber-attack detection systems are implemented based on manually designed rules by referring to domain knowledge (e.g., threat models, threat intelligences). However, this process is lack of intelligence and generalization ability. Aiming at this limitation, this paper proposes an intelligent cyber-attack detection method based on provenance data. To effective and efficient detect cyber-attacks from a huge number of system events in the provenance data, we firstly model the provenance data by a heterogeneous graph to capture the rich context information of each system entities (e.g., process, file, socket, etc.), and learns a semantic vector representation for each system entity. Then, we perform online cyber-attack detection by sampling a small and compact local graph from the heterogeneous graph, and classifying the key system entities as malicious or benign. We conducted a series of experiments on two provenance datasets with real cyber-attacks. The experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms other learning based detection models, and has competitive performance against state-of-the-art rule based cyber-attack detection systems.

cs.CR↗