APT Malware Detection Model Based on Heterogeneous Multimodal Semantic Fusion

In recent years, Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) malware, with its high stealth, has made it difficult for unimodal detection methods to accurately identify its disguised malicious behaviors. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an APT Malware Detection Model based on Heterogeneous Multimodal Semantic Fusion (HMSF-ADM). By integrating the API call sequence features of APT malware in the operating system and the RGB image features of PE files, the model constructs multimodal representations with stronger discriminability, thus achieving efficient and accurate identification of APT malicious behaviors. First, the model employs two encoders, namely a Transformer encoder equipped with the DPCFTE module and a CAS-ViT encoder, to encode sequence features and image features, respectively, completing local–global collaborative context modeling. Then, the sequence encoding results and image encoding results are interactively fused via two cross-attention mechanisms to generate fused representations. Finally, a TextCNN-based classifier is utilized to perform classification prediction on the fused representations. Experimental results on two APT malware datasets demonstrate that the proposed HMSF-ADM model outperforms various mainstream multimodal comparison models in core metrics such as accuracy, precision, and F1-score. Notably, the F1-score of the model exceeds 0.95 for the vast majority of APT malware families, and its accuracy and F1-score both remain above 0.986 in the task of distinguishing between ordinary malware and APT malware.