Model checking for data anomaly detection

Data tipically evolve according to specific processes, with the consequent possibility to identify a profile of evolution: the values it may assume, the frequencies at which it changes, the temporal variation in relation to other data, or other constraints that are directly connected to the reference domain. A violation of these conditions could be the signal of different menaces that threat the system, as well as: attempts of a tampering or a cyber attack, a failure in the system operation, a bug in the applications which manage the life cycle of data. To detect such violations is not straightforward as processes could be unknown or hard to extract. In this paper we propose an approach to detect data anomalies. We represent data user behaviours in terms of labelled transition systems and through the model checking techniques we demonstrate the proposed modeling can be exploited to successfully detect data anomalies.