SENTINEL: A Multi-Pathway Architecture for Detecting Living-Off-the-Land APT Attacks on Windows Command Lines

arXiv:2609.14593v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Living-Off-the-Land (LOTL) is the dominant evasion technique of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors, exploiting legitimate Windows utilities to conduct malicious operations without deploying custom malware and enabling state-sponsored campaigns to maintain persistent access within military and critical defense infrastructure for extended periods. Existing detection methods fail against obfuscated commands and multi-stage attack sequences, as demonstrated by the Volt Typhoon APT campaign, which maintained undetected access to U.S. critical infrastructure for over 18 months using exclusively signed Windows utilities. We present SENTINEL, a multi-pathway architecture integrating BERT-based semantic encoding, character-level CNN for obfuscation invariance, inter-command attention for multi-stage pattern recognition, and autoencoder-based anomaly scoring. Evaluated on a balanced Volt Typhoon benchmark derived from Microsoft and CISA threat intelligence advisories, SENTINEL achieves 92.0% accuracy on documented state-sponsored attack commands and 91.2% on obfuscated variants, compared to 74.0% and 72.0% for standalone BERT. Per-class analysis reveals that models achieving over 98% overall validation accuracy on imbalanced data exhibit only 44-58% malicious recall on balanced adversarial sets. Character-level processing contributes 5.6 percentage points of obfuscation invariance, and the 8.0 percentage point gap over augmentation-only baselines confirms structural architectural value beyond data-driven robustness alone.

Abstract:Living-Off-the-Land (LOTL) is the dominant evasion technique of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors, exploiting legitimate Windows utilities to conduct malicious operations without deploying custom malware and enabling state-sponsored campaigns to maintain persistent access within military and critical defense infrastructure for extended periods. Existing detection methods fail against obfuscated commands and multi-stage attack sequences, as demonstrated by the Volt Typhoon APT campaign, which maintained undetected access to U.S. critical infrastructure for over 18 months using exclusively signed Windows utilities. We present SENTINEL, a multi-pathway architecture integrating BERT-based semantic encoding, character-level CNN for obfuscation invariance, inter-command attention for multi-stage pattern recognition, and autoencoder-based anomaly scoring. Evaluated on a balanced Volt Typhoon benchmark derived from Microsoft and CISA threat intelligence advisories, SENTINEL achieves 92.0% accuracy on documented state-sponsored attack commands and 91.2% on obfuscated variants, compared to 74.0% and 72.0% for standalone BERT. Per-class analysis reveals that models achieving over 98% overall validation accuracy on imbalanced data exhibit only 44-58% malicious recall on balanced adversarial sets. Character-level processing contributes 5.6 percentage points of obfuscation invariance, and the 8.0 percentage point gap over augmentation-only baselines confirms structural architectural value beyond data-driven robustness alone.

Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM 2026). This is the authors' accepted version; the final published version will appear in IEEE Xplore. 7 pages, 6 figures, 1 table

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.14593 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2609.14593v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.14593 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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SENTINEL: A Multi-Pathway Architecture for Detecting Living-Off-the-Land APT Attacks on Windows Command Lines

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