Visible to the public An Anomaly Detection System for the Protection of Relational Database Systems against Data Leakage by Application Programs

TitleAn Anomaly Detection System for the Protection of Relational Database Systems against Data Leakage by Application Programs
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2020
AuthorsFadolalkarim, Daren, Bertino, Elisa, Sallam, Asmaa
Conference Name2020 IEEE 36th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)
PublisherIEEE
ISBN Number978-1-7281-2903-7
Keywordsanomaly detection, application profile, composability, data leakage, database, Databases, Hidden Markov models, Human Behavior, insider attacks, Metrics, Monitoring, Performance analysis, pubcrawl, relational database security, resilience, Resiliency, static analysis
AbstractApplication programs are a possible source of attacks to databases as attackers might exploit vulnerabilities in a privileged database application. They can perform code injection or code-reuse attack in order to steal sensitive data. However, as such attacks very often result in changes in the program's behavior, program monitoring techniques represent an effective defense to detect on-going attacks. One such technique is monitoring the library/system calls that the application program issues while running. In this paper, we propose AD-PROM, an Anomaly Detection system that aims at protecting relational database systems against malicious/compromised applications PROgraMs aiming at stealing data. AD-PROM tracks calls executed by application programs on data extracted from a database. The system operates in two phases. The first phase statically and dynamically analyzes the behavior of the application in order to build profiles representing the application's normal behavior. AD-PROM analyzes the control and data flow of the application program (i.e., static analysis), and builds a hidden Markov model trained by the program traces (i.e., dynamic analysis). During the second phase, the program execution is monitored in order to detect anomalies that may represent data leakage attempts. We have implemented AD-PROM and carried experimental activities to assess its performance. The results showed that our system is highly accurate in detecting changes in the application programs' behaviors and has very low false positive rates.
URLhttps://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9101350
DOI10.1109/ICDE48307.2020.00030
Citation Keyfadolalkarim_anomaly_2020