Not All Relations Are Equal: Relation-Balanced and Calibrated Graph Learning for Provenance-Based Intrusion Detection

Abstract

Provenance-Based Intrusion Detection Systems (PIDSs) detect Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) by analyzing system interactions. However, existing methods largely treat relations uniformly, overlooking statistical heterogeneity; in CADETS, relation frequencies differ by approximately $140{,}000\times$. This may cause PIDSs to focus more on frequent relations and overlook differences in normal error levels across relations, increasing the risk of false alarms and missed detections. We present RECAL, an unsupervised framework using relation-balanced masked graph learning to better capture rare interaction patterns. It further calibrates reconstruction errors against each relation's benign error distribution to produce comparable anomaly evidence, helping distinguish attacks from benign behavior and reduce false alarms. On three DARPA E3 datasets, RECAL achieves F1 scores of 99.99\%, 99.93\%, and 99.99\%, outperforming the best baseline on each dataset by 0.88, 0.82, and 0.42 percentage points, respectively. Compared with the baseline reporting the lowest FPR, RECAL reduces mean FPR by approximately $105\times$, $4\times$, and $41\times$.