Client-side runtime integrity agent for detecting man-in-the-browser attacks using forensic monitoring and anomaly detection
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Man-in-the-Browser (MitB) attacks represent a sophisticated class of web-based threats that manipulate browser functionality to intercept and modify user transactions in real-time. Traditional server-side detection mechanisms often fail to identify these attacks due to their client-side nature and encrypted communication channels. This paper presents a novel client-side runtime integrity agent that employs forensic monitoring and machine learning-based anomaly detection to identify MitB attacks at their source. The proposed system integrates DOM integrity verification, memory forensic analysis, and behavioral pattern recognition to detect malicious browser modifications before they can compromise user sessions. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates a detection accuracy of 97.3% with a false positive rate of 2.1%, significantly outperforming existing client-side detection methods. The system successfully identified various MitB attack vectors, including Zeus, SpyEye, and custom injection payloads, while maintaining a minimal computational overhead of less than 3% CPU utilization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it