CAM-LDS: Cyber Attack Manifestations for Automatic Interpretation of System Logs and Security Alerts

Log data are essential for intrusion detection and forensic investigations. However, manual log analysis is tedious due to high data volumes, heterogeneous event formats, and unstructured messages. Even though many automated methods for log analysis exist, they usually still rely on domain-specific configurations such as expert-defined detection rules, handcrafted log parsers, or manual feature-engineering. Crucially, the level of automation of conventional methods is limited due to their inability to semantically understand logs and explain their underlying causes. In contrast, Large Language Models enable domain- and format-agnostic interpretation of system logs and security alerts. Unfortunately, research on this topic remains challenging, because publicly available and labeled data sets covering a broad range of attack techniques are scarce. To address this gap, we introduce the Cyber Attack Manifestation Log Data Set (CAM-LDS), comprising seven attack scenarios that cover 81 distinct techniques across 13 tactics and collected from 18 distinct sources within a fully open-source and reproducible test environment. We extract log events that directly result from attack executions to facilitate analysis of manifestations concerning command observability, event frequencies, performance metrics, and intrusion detection alerts. We further present an illustrative case study utilizing an LLM to process the CAM-LDS. The results indicate that correct attack techniques are predicted perfectly for approximately one third of attack steps and adequately for another third, highlighting the potential of LLM-based log interpretation and utility of our data set.

Resource-Aware Deployment Optimization for Collaborative Intrusion Detection in Layered Networks

Collaborative Intrusion Detection Systems (CIDS) are increasingly adopted to counter cyberattacks, as their collaborative nature enables them to adapt to diverse scenarios across heterogeneous environments. As distributed critical infrastructure operates in rapidly evolving environments, such as drones in both civil and military domains, there is a growing need for CIDS architectures that can flexibly accommodate these dynamic changes. In this study, we propose a novel CIDS framework designed for easy deployment across diverse distributed environments. The framework dynamically optimizes detector allocation per node based on available resources and data types, enabling rapid adaptation to new operational scenarios with minimal computational overhead. We first conducted a comprehensive literature review to identify key characteristics of existing CIDS architectures. Based on these insights and real-world use cases, we developed our CIDS framework, which we evaluated using several distributed datasets that feature different attack chains and network topologies. Notably, we introduce a public dataset based on a realistic cyberattack targeting a ground drone aimed at sabotaging critical infrastructure. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CIDS framework can achieve adaptive, efficient intrusion detection in distributed settings, automatically reconfiguring detectors to maintain an optimal configuration, without requiring heavy computation, since all experiments were conducted on edge devices.