Detection of injections in API requests using recurrent neural networks and transformers Online publication date: Wed, 26-Oct-2022
by A. Sujan Reddy; Bhawana Rudra
International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics (IJESDF), Vol. 14, No. 6, 2022
Abstract: Application programming interfaces (APIs) are playing a vital role in every online business. The objective of this study is to analyse the incoming requests to a target API and flag any malicious activity. This paper proposes a solution based on sequence models and transformers for the identification of whether an API request has SQL injections, code injections, XSS attacks, operating system (OS) command injections, and other types of malicious injections or not. In this paper, we observe that transformers outperform B-RNNs in detecting malicious activity which is present in API requests. We also propose a novel heuristic procedure that minimises the number of false positives. We observe that the RoBERTa transformer outperforms and gives an accuracy of 100% on our dataset. We observe that the heuristic procedure works well in reducing the number of false positives when a large number of false positives exist in the predictions of the models.
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics (IJESDF):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:
Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.
If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com