Machine learning-assisted virtual patching of web applications
This work addresses security for web application developers and administrators, but it is incremental as it builds on existing WAF technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of web application vulnerabilities by proposing a machine learning-assisted approach to enhance Web Application Firewall (WAF) detection, specifically improving upon MODSECURITY with the OWASP Core Rule Set.
Web applications are permanently being exposed to attacks that exploit their vulnerabilities. In this work we investigate the application of machine learning techniques to leverage Web Application Firewall (WAF), a technology that is used to detect and prevent attacks. We propose a combined approach of machine learning models, based on one-class classification and n-gram analysis, to enhance the detection and accuracy capabilities of MODSECURITY, an open source and widely used WAF. The results are promising and outperform MODSECURITY when configured with the OWASP Core Rule Set, the baseline configuration setting of a widely deployed, rule-based WAF technology. The proposed solution, combining both approaches, allow us to deploy a WAF when no training data for the application is available (using one-class classification), and an improved one using n-grams when training data is available.