arXiv subjects

Ruitong Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Ruitong Liu.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

TransURL: Improving malicious URL detection with multi-layer Transformer encoding and multi-scale pyramid features

Machine learning progress is advancing the detection of malicious URLs. However, advanced Transformers applied to URLs face difficulties in extracting local information, character-level details, and structural relationships. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach for malicious URL detection, named TransURL. This method is implemented by co-training the character-aware Transformer with three feature modules: Multi-Layer Encoding, Multi-Scale Feature Learning, and Spatial Pyramid Attention. This specialized Transformer enables TransURL to extract embeddings with character-level information from URL token sequences, with the three modules aiding the fusion of multi-layer Transformer encodings and the capture of multi-scale local details and structural relationships. The proposed method is evaluated across several challenging scenarios, including class imbalance learning, multi-classification, cross-dataset testing, and adversarial sample attacks. Experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement compared to previous methods. For instance, it achieved a peak F1-score improvement of 40% in class-imbalanced scenarios and surpassed the best baseline by 14.13% in accuracy for adversarial attack scenarios. Additionally, a case study demonstrated that our method accurately identified all 30 active malicious web pages, whereas two previous state-of-the-art methods missed 4 and 7 malicious web pages, respectively. The codes and data are available at: https://github.com/Vul-det/TransURL/.

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arXiv2025

Vul-LMGNNs: Fusing language models and online-distilled graph neural networks for code vulnerability detection

Code Language Models (codeLMs) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used in code vulnerability detection. However, GNNs often rely on aggregating information from adjacent nodes, limiting structural information propagation across layers. While codeLMs can supplement GNNs with semantic information, existing integration methods underexplore their collaborative potential. To address these challenges, we propose Vul-LMGNNs, integrating pre-trained codeLMs with GNNs to enable cross-layer propagation of semantic and structural information. Vul-LMGNNs leverage Code Property Graphs (CPGs) to incorporate syntax, control flow, and data dependencies, using gated GNNs for structural extraction. An online knowledge distillation (KD) mechanism allows a student GNN to capture structural information from a trained counterpart via alternating training. Additionally, an "implicit-explicit" joint training framework leverages codeLMs to initialize embeddings and propagate code semantics. In the explicit phase, it performs late fusion via linear interpolation. Evaluations on real-world vulnerability datasets show Vul-LMGNNs outperform 17 state-of-the-art approaches. Source code is available at: https://github.com/Vul-LMGNN/vul-LMGNN.

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arXiv2023

Fed-urlBERT: Client-side Lightweight Federated Transformers for URL Threat Analysis

In evolving cyber landscapes, the detection of malicious URLs calls for cooperation and knowledge sharing across domains. However, collaboration is often hindered by concerns over privacy and business sensitivities. Federated learning addresses these issues by enabling multi-clients collaboration without direct data exchange. Unfortunately, if highly expressive Transformer models are used, clients may face intolerable computational burdens, and the exchange of weights could quickly deplete network bandwidth. In this paper, we propose Fed-urlBERT, a federated URL pre-trained model designed to address both privacy concerns and the need for cross-domain collaboration in cybersecurity. Fed-urlBERT leverages split learning to divide the pre-training model into client and server part, so that the client part takes up less extensive computation resources and bandwidth. Our appraoch achieves performance comparable to centralized model under both independently and identically distributed (IID) and two non-IID data scenarios. Significantly, our federated model shows about an 7% decrease in the FPR compared to the centralized model. Additionally, we implement an adaptive local aggregation strategy that mitigates heterogeneity among clients, demonstrating promising performance improvements. Overall, our study validates the applicability of the proposed Transformer federated learning for URL threat analysis, establishing a foundation for real-world collaborative cybersecurity efforts. The source code is accessible at https://github.com/Davidup1/FedURLBERT.

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