**6. Conclusions**

In this paper, we introduced a Self-Healing Version-Aware Ransomware Recovery Approach (SH-VARR) of XML-based documents. This proposed system consists mainly of two modules. The first is a decentralized version-aware control system that periodically takes a backup version for each file and keeps the latest one. The second is the accesscontrol module that executes special commands to protect the resulting versions from corruption or deletion caused by ransomware attacks; something that is carried out under administrator privileges.

The conducted set of experiments to assess the system focused on measuring the system performance in terms of the performance metrics: time, storage overhead, memory usage, and CPU utilization. Since compression is one of the main steps in the versioncontrol system module, we evaluated these metrics by considering two commonly used compression algorithms: bzip2 and gzip. Our technique (SH-VARR), introduced in this paper, uses the default zip algorithm. Comparisons show that the zip algorithm has the minimum time, size, utilization, and memory usage requirements. We conclude that this solution would protect XML-based files such as .docx and .odt files from ransomware attacks. The user can recover from such attacks even when the original files are deleted or encrypted. This is based on the assumption that these file types are compressed structures. In addition, we used a distributed version-aware control system to acquire a backup and keep track of each version. We observed access-control rules on these versions to achieve the core pillars of information security: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, A.S.S., O.A.-K. and B.A.-D.; methodology, M.A.-D.; software, M.A.-D. and A.S.S.; validation, M.A.-D.; writing—original draft preparation, M.A.-D.; writing— review and editing, M.A.-D., A.S.S., O.A.-K. and B.A.-D. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
