Understanding the Feature Space and Decision Boundaries of Commercial WAFs Using Maximum Entropy in the Mean

Abstract

The security of a network requires the correct identification and characterization of the attacks through its ports. This involves the follow-up of all the requests for access to the networks by all kinds of users. We consider the frequency of connections and the type of connections to a network, and determine their joint probability. This leads to the problem of determining a joint probability distribution from the knowledge of its marginals in the presence of errors of measurement. Mathematically, this consists of an ill-posed linear problem with convex constraints, which we solved by the method of maximum entropy in the mean. This procedure is flexible enough to accommodate errors in the data in a natural way. Also, the procedure is model-free and, hence, it does not require fitting unknown parameters.

Keywords

• cyber security
• web application firewalls
• feature space
• decision boundary
• ill-posed linear inverse problem
• maximum entropy in the mean