Online detection of malicious data access using DBMS auditing

  • Authors:
  • José Fonseca;Marco Vieira;Henrique Madeira

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Coimbra, Coimbra - Portugal;University of Coimbra, Coimbra - Portugal;University of Coimbra, Coimbra - Portugal

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

This paper proposes a mechanism that allows concurrent detection of malicious data access through the online analysis of the Database Management Systems (DBMS) audit trail. The proposed mechanism uses a directed graph representing the profile of valid transactions to detect illegal accesses to data, which are seen as unauthorized sequences of Structured Query Language (SQL) commands. The paper proposes a generic algorithm that learns the graph representing the profile of the transactions executed by the users. This mechanism can be used to protect traditional database applications from data attacks as well as web based applications from SQL injection types of attacks. The proposed mechanism is generic and can be used in most commercial DBMS, adding concurrent detection of malicious data access to classical database security mechanisms. The paper presents a practical example of the implementation of the proposed mechanism using Oracle 10g. The Transaction Processing Performance Council benchmark C (TPC-C) and a real database installation were used to assess the detection mechanism and learning algorithm.