An adaptive multi-layer botnet detection technique using machine learning classifiers

Riaz Ullah Khan, Xiaosong Zhang, Rajesh Kumar, Abubakar Sharif, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz, Mamoun Alazab

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    119 Citations (Scopus)
    180 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    In recent years, the botnets have been the most common threats to network security since it exploits multiple malicious codes like a worm, Trojans, Rootkit, etc. The botnets have been used to carry phishing links, to perform attacks and provide malicious services on the internet. It is challenging to identify Peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets as compared to Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and other types of botnets because P2P traffic has typical features of the centralization and distribution. To resolve the issues of P2P botnet identification, we propose an effective multi-layer traffic classification method by applying machine learning classifiers on features of network traffic. Our work presents a framework based on decision trees which effectively detects P2P botnets. A decision tree algorithm is applied for feature selection to extract the most relevant features and ignore the irrelevant features. At the first layer, we filter non-P2P packets to reduce the amount of network traffic through well-known ports, Domain Name System (DNS). query, and flow counting. The second layer further characterized the captured network traffic into non-P2P and P2P. At the third layer of our model, we reduced the features which may marginally affect the classification. At the final layer, we successfully detected P2P botnets using decision tree Classifier by extracting network communication features. Furthermore, our experimental evaluations show the significance of the proposed method in P2P botnets detection and demonstrate an average accuracy of 98.7%.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number2375
    Pages (from-to)1-22
    Number of pages22
    JournalApplied Sciences (Switzerland)
    Volume9
    Issue number11
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 11 Jun 2019

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