Biblio

The botnet has been one of the most common threats to the network security since it exploits multiple malicious codes like worm, Trojans, Rootkit, etc. These botnets are used to perform the attacks, send phishing links, and/or provide malicious services. It is difficult to detect Peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets as compare to IRC (Internet Relay Chat), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and other types of botnets because of having typical features of the centralization and distribution. To solve these problems, we propose an effective two-stage traffic classification method to detect P2P botnet traffic based on both non-P2P traffic filtering mechanism and machine learning techniques on conversation features. At the first stage, we filter non-P2P packages to reduce the amount of network traffic through well-known ports, DNS query, and flow counting. At the second stage, we extract conversation features based on data flow features and flow similarity. We detected P2P botnets successfully, by using Machine Learning Classifiers. Experimental evaluations show that our two-stage detection method has a higher accuracy than traditional P2P botnet detection methods.

Peer-to-Peer botnets have become one of the significant threat against network security due to their distributed properties. The decentralized nature makes their detection challenging. It is important to take measures to detect bots as soon as possible to minimize their harm. In this paper, we propose PeerGrep, a novel system capable of identifying P2P bots. PeerGrep starts from identifying hosts that are likely engaged in P2P communications, and then distinguishes P2P bots from P2P hosts by analyzing their active ratio, packet size and the periodicity of connection to destination IP addresses. The evaluation shows that PeerGrep can identify all P2P bots with quite low FPR even if the malicious P2P application and benign P2P application coexist within the same host or there is only one bot in the monitored network.

Botnets have long been used for malicious purposes with huge economic costs to the society. With the proliferation of cheap but non-secure Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices generating large amounts of data, the potential for damage from botnets has increased manifold. There are several approaches to detect bots or botnets, though many traditional techniques are becoming less effective as botnets with centralized command & control structure are being replaced by peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets which are harder to detect. Several algorithms have been proposed in literature that use graph analysis or machine learning techniques to detect the overlay structure of P2P networks in communication graphs. Many of these algorithms however, depend on the availability of a universal communication graph or a communication graph aggregated from several ISPs, which is not likely to be available in reality. In real world deployments, significant gaps in communication graphs are expected and any solution proposed should be able to work with partial information. In this paper, we analyze the effectiveness of some community detection algorithms in detecting P2P botnets, especially with partial information. We show that the approach can work with only about half of the nodes reporting their communication graphs, with only small increase in detection errors.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets have become one of the major threats in network security for serving as the infrastructure that responsible for various of cyber-crimes. Though a few existing work claimed to detect traditional botnets effectively, the problem of detecting P2P botnets involves more challenges. In this paper, we present PeerHunter, a community behavior analysis based method, which is capable of detecting botnets that communicate via a P2P structure. PeerHunter starts from a P2P hosts detection component. Then, it uses mutual contacts as the main feature to cluster bots into communities. Finally, it uses community behavior analysis to detect potential botnet communities and further identify bot candidates. Through extensive experiments with real and simulated network traces, PeerHunter can achieve very high detection rate and low false positives.