BiTTP: Bidirectional Consistency-Enhanced Framework for Low-Resource APT Tactic and Technique Attribution

Attributing advanced persistent threat (APT) activity to tactics and techniques in the MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base supports threat hunting and incident response, but annotated attack data are scarce. We present BiTTP, a consistency-verified self-training framework for low-resource APT tactic and technique attribution. An annotator labels unlabeled audit-trace subgraphs, and a pseudo-label is retained only when it passes consensus, confidence, and cross-view consistency gates. The last gate compares the encoded input subgraph with the encoded ATT&CK definition of the predicted technique in a bidirectionally aligned space. Bidirectional data generation, dual-view alignment, retrieval-grounded decoding, and a learned attention aggregator support this loop. On a generated benchmark and a controlled-environment audit-trace benchmark derived from TREC, BiTTP reaches a technique F1 of 0.960 and a tactic micro-F1 of 0.939. Under cross-dataset transfer, it maintains a tactic micro-F1 of 0.912. The largest gains occur under severe label scarcity: with 100 seed examples per tactic, BiTTP exceeds the F1 of strong fine-tuning with 300 seeds. Cross-view consistency is also an effective open-set rejection signal for a withheld technique and its semantically adjacent neighbor.

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Publication Details

Journal
Electronics
Published
2026-10-09
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics15204601
Primary Topic
Network Security and Intrusion Detection
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

BiTTP: Bidirectional Consistency-Enhanced Framework for Low-Resource APT Tactic and Technique Attribution

Gang Yang, Lin Ni, Xiang Peng
Electronics
Network Security and Intrusion Detection
article

BiTTP: Bidirectional Consistency-Enhanced Framework for Low-Resource APT Tactic and Technique Attribution

Gang Yang, Lin Ni, Xiang Peng
article en

Abstract

Attributing advanced persistent threat (APT) activity to tactics and techniques in the MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base supports threat hunting and incident response, but annotated attack data are scarce. We present BiTTP, a consistency-verified self-training framework for low-resource APT tactic and technique attribution. An annotator labels unlabeled audit-trace subgraphs, and a pseudo-label is retained only when it passes consensus, confidence, and cross-view consistency gates. The last gate compares the encoded input subgraph with the encoded ATT&CK definition of the predicted technique in a bidirectionally aligned space. Bidirectional data generation, dual-view alignment, retrieval-grounded decoding, and a learned attention aggregator support this loop. On a generated benchmark and a controlled-environment audit-trace benchmark derived from TREC, BiTTP reaches a technique F1 of 0.960 and a tactic micro-F1 of 0.939. Under cross-dataset transfer, it maintains a tactic micro-F1 of 0.912. The largest gains occur under severe label scarcity: with 100 seed examples per tactic, BiTTP exceeds the F1 of strong fine-tuning with 300 seeds. Cross-view consistency is also an effective open-set rejection signal for a withheld technique and its semantically adjacent neighbor.

ElectronicsVol. 15(20)
National University of Defense Technology (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 11%
Network Security and Intrusion Detection
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BiTTP: Bidirectional Consistency-Enhanced Framework for Low-Resource APT Tactic and Technique Attribution — Gang Yang, Lin Ni, et al. · Electronics (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS