Detecting Malware Based on DNS Graph Mining

Abstract

Malware remains a major threat to nowadays Internet. In this paper, we propose a DNS graph mining-based malware detection approach. A DNS graph is composed of DNS nodes, which represent server IPs, client IPs, and queried domain names in the process of DNS resolution. After the graph construction, we next transform the problem of malware detection to the graph mining task of inferring graph nodes’ reputation scores using the belief propagation algorithm. The nodes with lower reputation scores are inferred as those infected by malwares with higher probability. For demonstration, we evaluate the proposed malware detection approach with real-world dataset. Our real-world dataset is collected from campus DNS servers for three months and we built a DNS graph consisting of 19,340,820 vertices and 24,277,564 edges. On the graph, we achieve a true positive rate 80.63% with a false positive rate 0.023%. With a false positive of 1.20%, the true positive rate was improved to 95.66%. We detected 88,592 hosts infected by malware or C&C servers, accounting for the percentage of 5.47% among all hosts. Meanwhile, 117,971 domains are considered to be related to malicious activities, accounting for 1.5% among all domains. The results indicate that our method is efficient and effective in detecting malwares.