Enhancing Web Application Firewalls with Machine Learning for SQL Injection Detection

Abstract

Detecting SQL Injection (SQLi) attacks ranks among the most critical challenges in web application security. This research conducted a systematic literature review to identify the research gaps in this domain and responsively designed and optimised a DistilBERT-Stacked Ensemble pipeline to improve detection efficiency and robustness while reducing false-positive and false-negative rates. Comprehensive pre-processing and tokenisation were performed, DistilBERT embeddings were extracted, and machine-learning and ensemble classifiers were trained and ranked on accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score. The three best performers (Logistic Regression, XGBoost and SVM) were combined through a neural meta-learner to form a stacked ensemble. The ensemble was hardened with adversarial examples generated by the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and tuned with Optuna. The optimised ensemble achieved 99.81% across all reported metrics, closely comparable to the strongest single model (DistilBERT SVM, 99.82%). On the evaluation platform used in this study (Section 3.8), the ensemble classified the full test set in 0.0136s against 1.896s for DistilBERT-SVM, an approximately 140-fold reduction in measured inference latency, while retaining 99.77% accuracy under a single-step FGSM attack. The contribution is the design and validation of a SQLi detector performing with state-of-the-art accuracy at real-time speed and with demonstrated robustness to a single-step FGSM attack, rather than a marginal gain in accuracy. Sensitivity analysis further confirmed the stability of the model. These findings highlight the value of adversarial training and stacked meta-learning in building robust Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) for SQLi detection. For open validation, the dataset, test sets and models are made available at https://github.com/mlily2024/Final-project-SQL-injection-pipeline.