LogShield: A Transformer-based APT Detection System Leveraging Self-Attention

Cyber attacks are often identified using system and network logs. There have been significant prior works that utilize provenance graphs and ML techniques to detect attacks, specifically advanced persistent threats, which are very difficult to detect. Lately, there have been studies where transformer-based language models are being used to detect various types of attacks from system logs. However, no such attempts have been made in the case of APTs. In addition, existing state-of-the-art techniques that use system provenance graphs, lack a data processing framework generalized across datasets for optimal performance. For mitigating this limitation as well as exploring the effectiveness of transformer-based language models, this paper proposes LogShield, a framework designed to detect APT attack patterns leveraging the power of self-attention in transformers. We incorporate customized embedding layers to effectively capture the context of event sequences derived from provenance graphs. While acknowledging the computational overhead associated with training transformer networks, our framework surpasses existing LSTM and Language models regarding APT detection. We integrated the model parameters and training procedure from the RoBERTa model and conducted extensive experiments on well-known APT datasets (DARPA OpTC and DARPA TC E3). Our framework achieved superior F1 scores of 98% and 95% on the two datasets respectively, surpassing the F1 scores of 96% and 94% obtained by LSTM models. Our findings suggest that LogShield's performance benefits from larger datasets and demonstrates its potential for generalization across diverse domains. These findings contribute to the advancement of APT attack detection methods and underscore the significance of transformer-based architectures in addressing security challenges in computer systems.