DNS Traffic Forecasting Using Deep Neural Networks

Abstract

With the continuous growth of Internet usage, the importance of DNS has also increased, and the large amount of data collected by DNS servers from users’ queries becomes a very valuable data source, since it reveals user patterns and how their Internet usage changes through time. The periodicity in human behavior is also reflected in how users use the Internet and therefore in the DNS queries they generate. Thus, in this paper we propose the use of Machine Learning models in order to capture these Internet usage patterns for predicting DNS traffic, which has a huge relevance since a big difference between the expected DNS traffic and the real one, could be a sign of an anomaly in the data stream caused by an attack or a failure. To the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first attempt of forecasting DNS traffic using Neural Networks models, in order to propose an unsupervised and lightweight method to perform fast detection of anomalies in DNS data streams observed in DNS servers.