CTI2TTP: Evidence-Grounded TTP Extraction from Cyber Threat Intelligence via Diverge-then-Converge Verification

Abstract

Extracting MITRE ATT&CK techniques from cyber threat intelligence (CTI) reports is an open-set, multi-label problem requiring both high recall (not missing techniques) and high precision (not hallucinating unsupported ones). Existing rule-based, supervised, and LLM-based methods struggle to achieve both: rule-based and supervised approaches lack generalizability across diverse attack descriptions, while LLM-based approaches that couple candidate generation and validation within a single inference step suffer from limited recall and precision simultaneously. We propose CTI2TTP, which addresses this challenge through a diverge-then-converge design inspired by how human analysts work: first extracting broadly, then verifying rigorously. Reports are first decomposed into atomic behaviors, each anchored by a deterministic span localization stage to a specific evidence window in the source text. Candidate techniques are then proposed broadly for each behavior, and a convergent verification stage retains only candidates supported by both the localized evidence and the authoritative MITRE definition. We contribute two evaluation resources, a cleaned TRAM benchmark (TRAM-Clean) and a new annotated dataset (CTI2TTP-Bench), to address known annotation noise in existing benchmarks and elevate the task to document-level TTP extraction. On TRAM-Clean and CTI2TTP-Bench, CTI2TTP achieves 76.48% and 87.39% macro-F1 respectively, outperforming chain-of-thought prompting with the same backbone by 63.5% and 29.4%.