A High-Accuracy Advanced Persistent Threat Detection Model: Integrating Convolutional Neural Networks with Kepler-Optimized Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units
Guangwu Hu, Maoqi Sun, Chaoqin Zhang · Electronics · 2025
Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) refers to a highly targeted, sophisticated, and prolonged form of cyberattack, typically directed at specific organizations or individuals. The primary objective of such attacks is the theft of sensitive information or the disruption of critical operations. APT attacks are characterized by their stealth and complexity, often resulting in significant economic losses. Furthermore, these attacks may lead to intelligence breaches, operational interruptions, and even jeopardize national security and political stability. Given the covert nature and extended durations of APT attacks, current detection solutions encounter challenges such as high detection difficulty and insufficient accuracy. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an innovative high-accuracy APT attack detection model, CNN-KOA-BiGRU, which integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units (BiGRU), and the Kepler optimization algorithm (KOA). The model first utilizes CNN to extract spatial features from network traffic data, followed by the application of BiGRU to capture temporal dependencies and long-term memory, thereby forming comprehensive temporal features. Simultaneously, the Kepler optimization algorithm is employed to optimize the BiGRU network structure, achieving globally optimal feature weights and enhancing detection accuracy. Additionally, this study employs a combination of sampling techniques, including Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) and Tomek links, to mitigate classification bias caused by dataset imbalance. Evaluation results on the CSE-CIC-IDS2018 experimental dataset demonstrate that the CNN-KOA-BiGRU model achieves superior performance in detecting APT attacks, with an average accuracy of 98.68%. This surpasses existing methods, including CNN (93.01%), CNN-BiGRU (97.77%), and Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) (95.96%) on the same dataset. Specifically, the proposed model demonstrates an accuracy improvement of 5.67% over CNN, 0.91% over CNN-BiGRU, and 2.72% over GCN. Overall, the proposed model achieves an average improvement of 3.1% compared to existing methods.