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Abstract
Database systems are extensively used to store critical data across various
domains. However, the frequency of abnormal database access behaviors, such as
database intrusion by internal and external attacks, continues to rise.
Internal masqueraders often have greater organizational knowledge, making it
easier to mimic employee behavior effectively. In contrast, external
masqueraders may behave differently due to their lack of familiarity with the
organization. Current approaches lack the granularity needed to detect
anomalies at the operational level, frequently misclassifying entire sequences
of operations as anomalies, even though most operations are likely to represent
normal behavior. On the other hand, some anomalous behaviors often resemble
normal activities, making them difficult for existing detection methods to
identify. This paper introduces a two-tiered anomaly detection approach for
Structured Query Language (SQL) using the Bidirectional Encoder Representations
from Transformers (BERT) model, specifically DistilBERT, a more efficient,
pre-trained version. Our method combines both unsupervised and supervised
machine learning techniques to accurately identify anomalous activities while
minimizing the need for data labeling. First, the unsupervised method uses
ensemble anomaly detectors that flag embedding vectors distant from learned
normal patterns of typical user behavior across the database (out-of-scope
queries). Second, the supervised method uses fine-tuned transformer-based
models to detect internal attacks with high precision (in-scope queries), using
role-labeled classification, even on limited labeled SQL data. Our findings
make a significant contribution by providing an effective solution for
safeguarding critical database systems from sophisticated threats.