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A Novel Web Anomaly Detection Approach Based on Semantic Structure

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Security and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data (SocialSec 2020)

Abstract

In recent years, various machine learning, deep learning based models have been developed to detect novel web attacks. These models are mostly use NLP methods, like N-gram, word-embedding, to process URLs as the general strings composed of characters. In contrast to natural language which consist of words, the URL is composed of characters and hardly decomposes into several meaning segments. In fact, HTTP requests have its inherent patterns, which so-called semantic structure, such as the request bodies have fixed type, request parameters have fixed structure in names and orders, values of these parameters also have special semantics such as username, password, page id, commodity id. These methods have no mechanism to learn semantic structure. They roughly use NLP techniques like DFA, attention techniques to learn normal patterns from dataset. And, they also need a mount of dataset to train. In this paper, we propose a novel web anomaly detection approach based on semantic structure. Firstly, a hierarchical method is proposed to automatically learn semantic structure from training dataset. Then, we learn normal profile for each parameter. The experimental results showed that our approach achieved a high precision rate of 99.29% while maintaining a low false alarm rate of 0.88%. Moreover, even on a small training dataset composed of hundreds of samples, we also achieved 96.3% accuracy rate.

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Correspondence to Zishuai Cheng .

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Cheng, Z., Cui, B., Fu, J. (2020). A Novel Web Anomaly Detection Approach Based on Semantic Structure. In: Xiang, Y., Liu, Z., Li, J. (eds) Security and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data. SocialSec 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1298. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9031-3_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9031-3_2

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