Symmetric Dual-Phase Framework for APT Attack Detection Based on Multi-Feature-Conditioned GAN and Graph Convolutional Network
Qi Liu, Yao Dong, Zheng Chao, Hualin Dai, Jiaxing Wang, Liyuan Ning, Qiqi Liang · Symmetry · 2025
Advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks present significant challenges to cybersecurity due to their covert nature, high complexity, and ability to operate across multiple temporal and spatial scales. Existing detection techniques often struggle with issues like class imbalance, insufficient feature extraction, and the inability to capture complex attack dependencies. To address these limitations, we propose a dual-phase framework for APT detection, combining multi-feature-conditioned generative adversarial networks (MF-CGANs) for data reconstruction and a multi-scale convolution and channel attention-enhanced graph convolutional network (MC-GCN) for improved attack detection. The MF-CGAN model generates minority-class samples to resolve the class imbalance problem, while MC-GCN leverages advanced feature extraction and graph convolution to better model the intricate relationships within network traffic data. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves significant improvements over baseline models. Specifically, MC-GCN outperforms traditional CNN-based IDS models, with accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score improvements ranging from 0.47% to 13.41%. The MC-GCN model achieves an accuracy of 99.87%, surpassing CNN (86.46%) and GCN (99.24%), while also exhibiting high precision (99.87%) and recall (99.88%). These results highlight the proposed model’s superior ability to handle class imbalance and capture complex attack behaviors, establishing it as a leading approach for APT detection.