XML-AD: Detecting anomalous patterns in XML documents

Many information systems use XML documents to store data and to interact with other systems. Abnormal documents, which can be the result of either an on-going cyber attack or the actions of a benign user, can potentially harm the interacting systems and are therefore regarded as a threat. In this paper we address the problem of anomaly detection and localization in XML documents using machine learning techniques. We present XML-AD – a new XML anomaly detection framework. Within this framework, an automatic method for extraction of feature from XML documents as well as a practical method for transforming XML features into vectors of fixed dimensionality was developed. With these two methods in place, the XML-AD framework makes it possible to utilize general learning algorithms for anomaly detection. The core of the framework consists of a novel multi-univariate anomaly detection algorithm, ADIFA. The framework was evaluated using four XML documents datasets which were obtained from real information systems. It achieved over 89% true positive detection rate with less than 0.2% of false positives.