PROVSYN: Synthesizing Provenance Graphs for Data Augmentation in Intrusion Detection Systems

Provenance graph analysis plays a vital role in intrusion detection, particularly against Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), by exposing complex attack patterns. While recent systems combine graph neural networks (GNNs) with natural language processing (NLP) to capture structural and semantic features, their effectiveness is limited by class imbalance in real-world data. To address this, we introduce PROVSYN, an automated framework that synthesizes provenance graphs through a three-phase pipeline: (1) heterogeneous graph structure synthesis with structural-semantic modeling, (2) rule-based topological refinement, and (3) context-aware textual attribute synthesis using large language models (LLMs). PROVSYN includes a comprehensive evaluation framework that integrates structural, textual, temporal, and embedding-based metrics, along with a semantic validation mechanism to assess the correctness of generated attack patterns and system behaviors. To demonstrate practical utility, we use the synthetic graphs to augment training datasets for downstream APT detection models. Experimental results show that PROVSYN produces high-fidelity graphs and improves detection performance through effective data augmentation.

@article{huang2025_2506.06226,
  title={ PROVSYN: Synthesizing Provenance Graphs for Data Augmentation in Intrusion Detection Systems },
  author={ Yi Huang and Wajih UI Hassan and Yao Guo and Xiangqun Chen and Ding Li },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.06226},
  year={ 2025 }
}