Insider Threat Detection Using GCN and Bi-LSTM with Explicit and Implicit Graph Representations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel insider threat detection framework that combines explicit and implicit graph representations with temporal modeling to effectively identify malicious user activities.

Contribution

It proposes a hybrid graph-based approach using GCNs and Bi-LSTM, integrating handcrafted and learned graph structures for improved insider threat detection.

Findings

Achieves 98.62% AUC on CERT r5.2 dataset.

Attains 80.15% detection rate on r6.2 dataset.

Outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract

Insider threat detection (ITD) is challenging due to the subtle and concealed nature of malicious activities performed by trusted users. This paper proposes a post-hoc ITD framework that integrates explicit and implicit graph representations with temporal modelling to capture complex user behaviour patterns. An explicit graph is constructed using predefined organisational rules to model direct relationships among user activities. To mitigate noise and limitations in this hand-crafted structure, an implicit graph is learned from feature similarities using the Gumbel-Softmax trick, enabling the discovery of latent behavioural relationships. Separate Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) process the explicit and implicit graphs to generate node embeddings, which are concatenated and refined through an attention mechanism to emphasise threat-relevant features. The refined representations are then passed to a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) network to capture temporal dependencies in user behaviour. Activities are flagged as anomalous when their probability scores fall below a predefined threshold. Extensive experiments on CERT r5.2 and r6.2 datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods. On r5.2, the model achieves an AUC of 98.62, a detection rate of 100%, and a false positive rate of 0.05. On the more challenging r6.2 dataset, it attains an AUC of 88.48, a detection rate of 80.15%, and a false positive rate of 0.15, highlighting the effectiveness of combining graph-based and temporal representations for robust ITD.