Advance Approach for Detection of DNS Tunneling Attack from Network Packets Using Deep Learning Algorithms

Domain Name System (DNS) is a protocol for converting numeric IP addresses of websites into a human-readable form. With the development of technology, to transfer information, a method like DNS tunneling is used which includes data encryption into DNS queries. The ability of the DNS tunneling method of transferring data attracts attackers to establish bidirectional communication with machines infected with malwares. This can lead to sending instructions in an obfuscated way or can lead to data exfiltration. Since firewalls and intrusion detection systems detect only specific types of tunneling, were as the Machine Learning Algorithms can analyze and predict based on previous data provided to it, it is being adopted by researchers to detect and predict the occurrence of DNS Tunneling. The identification of anomalies in Network packets can be done by using Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique. The experimental test accuracy showed that the feature extraction method in NLP for detecting DNS tunneling in network packets was found to be 98.42% on the generated Dataset. This paper makes a comparative study of 1 Dimensional Convolution Neural Network (1-D CNN), Simple Recurrent Neural Network (Simple RNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) algorithm, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) algorithm for detecting DNS Tunneling over the generated dataset. To detect this threat of DNS tunneling attack, good quality of the dataset is required. This paper also proposes the generation of a good quality dataset that contains network packets, by the recreation of DNS Tunneling attack using tool dnscat2

A hybrid method of genetic algorithm and support vector machine for DNS tunneling detection

With the expansion of the business over the internet, corporations nowadays are investing numerous amounts of money in the web applications. However, there are different threats could make the corporations vulnerable for potential attacks. One of these threats is harnessing the domain name protocol for passing harmful information, this kind of threats is known as DNS tunneling. As a result, confidential information would be exposed and violated. Several studies have investigated the machine learning in order to propose a detection approach. In their approaches, authors have used different and numerous types of features such as domain length, number of bytes, content, volume of DNS traffic, number of hostnames per domain, geographic location and domain history. Apparently, there is a vital demand to accommodate feature selection task in order to identify the best features. This paper proposes a hybrid method of genetic algorithm feature selection approach with the support vector machine classifier for the sake of identifying the best features that have the ability to optimize the detection of DNS tunneling. To evaluate the proposed method, a benchmark dataset of DNS tunneling has been used. Results showed that the proposed method has outperformed the conventional SVM by achieving 0.946 of f-measur

Network-Based Detection and Prevention System against DNS-Based Attacks

Individuals and organizations rely on the Internet as an essential environment for personal or business transactions. However, individuals and organizations have been primary targets for attacks that steal sensitive data. Adversaries can use different approaches to hide their activities inside the compromised network and communicate covertly between the malicious servers and the victims. The domain name system (DNS) protocol is one of these approaches that adversaries use to transfer stolen data outside the organization\u27s network using various forms of DNS tunneling attacks. The main reason for targeting the DNS protocol is because DNS is available in almost every network, ignored, and rarely monitored. In this work, the primary aim is to design a reliable and robust network-based solution as a detection system against DNS-based attacks using various techniques, including visualization, machine learning techniques, and statistical analysis. The network-based solution acts as a DNS proxy server that provides DNS services as well as detection and prevention against DNS-based attacks, which are either embedded in malware or used as stand-alone attacking tools. The detection system works in two modes: real-time and offline modes. The real-time mode relies on the developed Payload Analysis (PA) module. In contrast, the offline mode operates based on two of the contributed modules in this dissertation, including the visualization and Traffic Analysis (TA) modules. We conducted various experiments in order to test and evaluate the detection system against simulated real-world attacks. Overall, the detection system achieved high accuracy of 99.8% with no false-negative rate. To validate the method, we compared the developed detection system against the open-source detection system, Snort intrusion detection system (IDS). We evaluated the two detection systems using a confusion matrix, including the recall, false-negatives rate, accuracy, and others. The detection system detects all case scenarios of the attacks while Snort missed 50% of the performed attacks. Based on the results, we can conclude that the detection system is significant and original improvement of the present methods used for detecting and preventing DNS-based attacks

Your Smart Home Can't Keep a Secret: Towards Automated Fingerprinting of IoT Traffic with Neural Networks

The IoT (Internet of Things) technology has been widely adopted in recent years and has profoundly changed the people's daily lives. However, in the meantime, such a fast-growing technology has also introduced new privacy issues, which need to be better understood and measured. In this work, we look into how private information can be leaked from network traffic generated in the smart home network. Although researchers have proposed techniques to infer IoT device types or user behaviors under clean experiment setup, the effectiveness of such approaches become questionable in the complex but realistic network environment, where common techniques like Network Address and Port Translation (NAPT) and Virtual Private Network (VPN) are enabled. Traffic analysis using traditional methods (e.g., through classical machine-learning models) is much less effective under those settings, as the features picked manually are not distinctive any more. In this work, we propose a traffic analysis framework based on sequence-learning techniques like LSTM and leveraged the temporal relations between packets for the attack of device identification. We evaluated it under different environment settings (e.g., pure-IoT and noisy environment with multiple non-IoT devices). The results showed our framework was able to differentiate device types with a high accuracy. This result suggests IoT network communications pose prominent challenges to users' privacy, even when they are protected by encryption and morphed by the network gateway. As such, new privacy protection methods on IoT traffic need to be developed towards mitigating this new issue

A novel deep-learning based approach to DNS over HTTPS network traffic detection

Domain name system (DNS) over hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) (DoH) is currently a new standard for secure communication between DNS servers and end-users. Secure sockets layer (SSL)/transport layer security (TLS) encryption should guarantee the user a high level of privacy regarding the impossibility of data content decryption and protocol identification. Our team created a DoH data set from captured real network traffic and proposed novel deep-learning-based detection models allowing encrypted DoH traffic identification. Our detection models were trained on the network traffic from the Czech top-level domain maintainer, Czech network interchange center (CZ.NIC), and successfully applied to the identification of the DoH traffic from Cloudflare. The reached detection model accuracy was near 95%, and it is clear that the encryption does not prohibit the DoH protocol identification

Real time detection of malicious DoH traffic using statistical analysis

The DNS protocol plays a fundamental role in the operation of ubiquitous networks. All devices connected to these networks need DNS to work, both for traditional domain name to IP address translation, and for more advanced services such as resource discovery. DNS over HTTPS (DoH) solves certain security problems present in the DNS protocol. However, malicious DNS tunnels, a covert way of encapsulating malicious traffic in a DNS connection, are difficult to detect because the encrypted data prevents performing an analysis of the content of the DNS traffic. In this study, we introduce a real-time system for detecting malicious DoH tunnels, which is based on analyzing DoH traffic using statistical methods. Our research demonstrates that it is feasible to identify in real-time malicious traffic by analyzing specific parameters extracted from DoH traffic. In addition, we conducted statistical analysis to identify the most significant features that distinguish malicious traffic from benign traffic. Using the selected features, we achieved satisfactory results in classifying DoH traffic as either benign or malicious