Recurrent neural networks towards detection of SQL attacks

Abstract

In the paper we present a new approach based on application of neural networks to detect SQL attacks. SQL attacks are those attacks that take advantage of using SQL statements to be performed. The problem of detection of this class of attacks is transformed to time series prediction problem. SQL queries are used as a source of events in a protected environment. To differentiate between normal SQL queries and those sent by an attacker we divide SQL statements into tokens and pass them to our detection system, which predicts the next token, taking into account previously seen tokens. In the learning phase tokens are passed to recurrent neural network (RNN) trained by back-propagation through time (BPTT) algorithm. Teaching data are shifted by one token forward in time with relation to input. The purpose of the testing phase is to predict the next token in the sequence. All experiments were conducted on Jordan and Elman networks using data gathered from PHP Nuke portal. Experimental results show that the Jordan network outperforms the Elman network predicting correctly queries of the length up to ten.