Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
4955765 Journal of Information Security and Applications 2017 20 Pages PDF
Abstract

Data leakage is at the heart most of the privacy breaches worldwide. In this paper we present a white-box approach to detect potential data leakage by spotting anomalies in database transactions. We refer to our solution as white-box because it builds self explanatory profiles that are easy to understand and update, as opposite to black-box systems which create profiles hard to interpret and maintain (e.g., neural networks). In this paper we introduce our approach and we demonstrate that it is a major leap forward w.r.t. previous work on the topic in several aspects: (i) it significantly decreases the number of false positives, which is orders of magnitude lower than in state-of-the-art comparable approaches (we demonstrate this using an experimental dataset consisting of millions of real enterprise transactions); (ii) it creates profiles that are easy to understand and update, and therefore it provides an explanation of the origins of an anomaly; (iii) it allows the introduction of a feedback mechanism that makes possible for the system to improve based on its own mistakes; and (iv) feature aggregation and transaction flow analysis allow the system to detect threats which span over multiple features and multiple transactions.

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Computer Science Computer Networks and Communications
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