XML Schema-based Minification for Communication of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Systems in Cloud Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces an XML Schema-based minification technique for SIEM system communication in cloud environments, significantly reducing message size and improving efficiency without compromising readability.

Contribution

It proposes a novel XML minification method that separates meaningful names from minified ones, enhancing readability while reducing message size in cloud-based SIEM communications.

Findings

Message size reduced by up to 50.34% without compression.

Adding GZip compression yields 66.1% size reduction.

Technique improves efficiency and reduces cloud communication costs.

Abstract

XML-based communication governs most of today's systems communication, due to its capability of representing complex structural and hierarchical data. However, XML document structure is considered a huge and bulky data that can be reduced to minimize bandwidth usage, transmission time, and maximize performance. This contributes to a more efficient and utilized resource usage. In cloud environments, this affects the amount of money the consumer pays. Several techniques are used to achieve this goal. This paper discusses these techniques and proposes a new XML Schema-based Minification technique. The proposed technique works on XML Structure reduction using minification. The proposed technique provides a separation between the meaningful names and the underlying minified names, which enhances software/code readability. This technique is applied to Intrusion Detection Message Exchange Format (IDMEF) messages, as part of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system communication hosted on Microsoft Azure Cloud. Test results show message size reduction ranging from 8.15% to 50.34% in the raw message, without using time-consuming compression techniques. Adding GZip compression to the proposed technique produces 66.1% shorter message size compared to original XML messages.