Improved Edit Distance Method for System Call Anomaly Detection

Edit distance has been widely used in different areas to evaluate the similarity between strings of characters. In this paper, the improved edit distance is applied into the short sequence anomaly detection, a kind of host security area. Some modifications for original edit distance including the position exchange and the shortest distance algorithm are described in detail. Through experiment, it shows that the edit distance based anomaly detection method is proved to be more stable and better detection precision than the classical sequence analysis STIDE method.