Anomaly Detection in Cloud API Access Patterns Using Temporal Convolutional Networks

Cloud platforms generate massive API access logs, where abnormal patterns may indicate security breaches, insider threats, or compromised credentials, demanding intelligent and automated anomaly detection mechanisms. Conventional approaches employ segmentation, statistical profiling, clustering, recurrent networks, and supervised classifiers to model sequential API behavior and distinguish normal activities from malicious deviations. These techniques generally achieve high detection accuracy and improved threat visibility, enhancing cybersecurity monitoring systems while reducing manual auditing efforts in large-scale distributed cloud environments. However, they struggle with evolving attack patterns, high false-positive rates, limited temporal dependency modelling, data imbalance, and poor generalization across heterogeneous cloud infrastructures. This study proposes a self-supervised Temporal Convolutional Network with adaptive anomaly scoring, achieving robust sequential modelling, reduced false alarms, and improved detection stability in cloud APIs. A self-supervised Temporal Convolutional Network models sequential API behavior using causal dilated convolutions and adaptive scoring, enabling accurate, scalable, and real-time cloud anomaly detection.