Securing Your Transactions: Detecting Anomalous Patterns in XML Documents

XML transactions are used in many information systems to store data and interact with other systems. Abnormal transactions, the result of either an on-going cyber attack or the actions of a benign user, can potentially harm the interacting systems and therefore they are regarded as a threat. In this paper the authors address the problem of anomaly detection and localization in XML transactions using machine learning techniques. They present a new XML anomaly detection framework, XML-AD. Within this framework, an automatic method for extracting features from XML transactions was developed as well as a practical method for transforming XML features into vectors of fixed dimensionality.