evolution and formally identifies the different
classes of anomalies in the expression of the policy
because we believe that the cohabitation of several
anomalies can initiate more complex attack
scenarios. The architecture of the anomalies
detection approach in a correlated risk management
context is also presented in the present paper.
The remainder of this paper is structured as
follow: in section 2, we present the state-of-the-art.
In section 3, we present our detection approach for
the specific case of inconsistency anomalies and
partial implementation anomalies. In section 4, we
discuss our solution and present some perspectives.
In section 5 we conclude and give an overview of
the work in progress.
2 THE STATE-OF-THE- ART
The existing solutions in the insider threat field can
be categorized according to the strategy for threat
detection into signature-based solutions, rule-based
solutions and user behavior analytics. The signature-
based technique concerns the misuse detection. It
has a predefined repository that contains the set of
patterns that describe the different misuse scenarios.
This technique fails to account for unknown threats.
The rule-based technique relies on a set of rules for
detecting intrusion scenarios. The user behavior
analytics is a technique which studies the user
behavior in order to detect potential threats. These
techniques differ from each another by used
algorithms in each approach. Anyway, various
works exist in each particular field.
For intrusion detection (ID) in relational
database management system (RDBMS), the
proposed approach in (Senthil et al., 2013) defines
an ID mechanism that consists of two main elements
tailored for RDBMS: an anomaly detection system
(ADS) and an anomaly response system (ARS). In
the ADS, the construction of database access
profiles of role and users and the use of such profiles
for the AD tasks are concerned. Alongside their
paper, the authors describe the response component
of their intrusion detection system for a DBMS that
response to an anomalous user request.
Considering malicious insiders, authors in (Khan
et al., 2018) take a sequence of queries rather than
one SQL query in isolation and a model behavior to
detect malicious RDBMS accesses using frequent
and rare item sets mining. They consider their
approach as an alternative to the conventional
anomaly-based detection approach because auditing
log for data mining needs are not anomalies free and
can already contain possible anomalies. They extend
their approach with the conventional anomaly-based
detection approach in order to detect the mimicry
attacks or frequent attacks query pattern.
In (Ramachandran et al., 2018), authors propose
a novel method of anomaly detection in “role-
administrated relational database”. They produce a
mechanism for finding the anomalies in RBAC
policies by using machine learning technique such as
classification using a support vector machine (SVM)
classifier. The detection is made through three
phases: the profile creation; the training phase; and
the intrusion detection phase.
In (Sallam et al., 2016), authors propose to detect
anomalies in user access by learning profiles of
normal access patterns in different database
management systems. Database exfiltration attempt
from insiders is particularly concerned. They make a
classification of detected anomalies by using a naive
Bayesian and the multi-labeling methods. The
related architecture is presented in the paper. An
internal representation of the queries is also
presented followed by the description of the use of
classification and clustering to detect anomalies.
In “Detection of Temporal Insider Threats to
Relational Database”, Sallam et al. propose
techniques for detecting anomalous accesses in
relational databases, that are able to track users
actions across time. In order to detect correlated
ones that collectively flag anomalies, they deal with
queries that retrieve amounts of data larger than
normal (Sallam et al., 2017).
Although anomalies detection is an effective
technique for flagging early signs of insider attacks,
modern techniques for the detection of anomalies in
databases are not able to detect several sophisticated
data updates and aggregation of data by insider that
exceeds his or her need to perform job functions
(Sallam et al., 2019). In their paper, the authors
propose an anomaly detection technique designed to
detect data aggregation and attempt to track data
updates. Their technique captures the normal data
access rates from past logs of user activity during a
training phase (Sallam et al., 2019), then they build
profiles for DB tables and tuples. This technique
operates in two phases: training and detection.
Authors in (Grushka-Cohen, 2019) present Data
Activity Monitoring Systems (DAMS) that are
commonly used by organizations to protect the
organizational data, knowledge and intellectual
properties. A DAMS has two roles: monitoring
(documenting activities) and alerting anomalous
activities. Generally, such systems are just using
sample of activity due to the high amount of data.