Federated Learning for XSS Detection: A Privacy-Preserving Approach

Mahran Jazi, Irad Ben-Gal

Abstract: Collaboration between edge devices has increased the scale of machine learning (ML), which can be attributed to increased access to large volumes of data. Nevertheless, traditional ML models face significant hurdles in securing sensitive information due to rising concerns about data privacy. As a result, federated learning (FL) has emerged as another way to enable devices to learn from each other without exposing user’s data. This paper suggests that FL can be used as a validation mechanism for finding and blocking malicious attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS). Our contribution lies in demonstrating the practical effectiveness of this approach on a real-world dataset, the details of which are expounded upon herein. Moreover, we conduct comparative performance analysis, pitting our FL approach against traditional centralized parametric ML methods, such as logistic regression (LR), deep neural networks (DNNs), support vector machines (SVMs), and k-nearest neighbors (KNN), thus s