• The KIPS Transactions:PartC
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• v.10C no.6
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• pp.683-694
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• 2003

We present X-tree Diff, a change detection algorithm for tree-structured data. Our work is motivated by need to monitor massive volume of web documents and detect suspicious changes, called defacement attack on web sites. From this context, our algorithm should be very efficient in speed and use of memory space. X-tree Diff uses a special ordered labeled tree, X-tree, to represent XML/HTML documents. X-tree nodes have a special field, tMD, which stores a 128-bit hash value representing the structure and data of subtrees, so match identical subtrees form the old and new versions. During this process, X-tree Diff uses the Rule of Delaying Ambiguous Matchings, implying that it perform exact matching where a node in the old version has one-to one corrspondence with the corresponding node in the new, by delaying all the others. It drastically reduces the possibility of wrong matchings. X-tree Diff propagates such exact matchings upwards in Step 2, and obtain more matchings downwsards from roots in Step 3. In step 4, nodes to ve inserted or deleted are decided, We aldo show thst X-tree Diff runs on O(n), woere n is the number of noses in X-trees, in worst case as well as in average case, This result is even better than that of BULD Diff algorithm, which is O(n log(n)) in worst case, We experimented X-tree Diff on reat data, which are about 11,000 home pages from about 20 wev sites, instead of synthetic documets manipulated for experimented for ex[erimentation. Currently, X-treeDiff algorithm is being used in a commeercial hacking detection system, called the WIDS(Web-Document Intrusion Detection System), which is to find changes occured in registered websites, and report suspicious changes to users.