An on-line learning statistical model to detect malicious web requests

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingsConference contributionpeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Detecting malicious connection attempts and attacks against web-based applications is one of many approaches to protect the World Wide Web and its users. In this paper, we present a generic method for detecting anomalous and potentially malicious web requests from the network's point of view without prior knowledge or training data of the web-based application. The algorithm assumes that a legitimate request is an ordered sequence of semantic entities. Malicious requests are in different order or include entities which deviate from the structure of the majority of requests. Our method learns a variable-order Markov model from legitimate sequences of semantic entities. If a sequence's probability deviates from previously seen ones, it is reported as anomalous. Experiments were conducted on logs from a social networking web site. The results indicate that that the proposed method achieves good detection rates at acceptable false-alarm rates.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSecurity and Privacy in Communication Networks - 7th International ICST Conference, SecureComm 2011, Revised Selected Papers
Pages19-38
Number of pages20
Volume96
Edition96
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012
Event7th International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, SecureComm 2011 - London, United Kingdom
Duration: 7 Sept 20119 Sept 2011

Publication series

NameLecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
Volume96 LNICST
ISSN (Print)1867-8211

Conference

Conference7th International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, SecureComm 2011
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period07.09.201109.09.2011

Keywords

  • anomaly detection
  • intrusion detection
  • Markov model
  • on-line learning
  • web security

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