Suphannee Sivakorn (Columbia University), Kangkook Jee (NEC Labs America), Yixin Sun (Princeton University), Lauri Korts-Pärn (Cyber Defense Institute), Zhichun Li (NEC Labs America), Cristian Lumezanu (NEC Labs America), Zhenyu Wu (NEC Labs America), Lu-An Tang (NEC Labs America), Ding Li (NEC Labs America)

Modern malware and cyber attacks depend heavily on DNS services to make their campaigns reliable and difficult to track. Monitoring network DNS activities and blocking suspicious domains have been proven an effective technique in countering such attacks. However, recent successful campaigns reveal that at- tackers adapt by using seemingly benign domains and public web storage services to hide malicious activity. Also, the recent support for encrypted DNS queries provides attacker easier means to hide malicious traffic from network-based DNS monitoring.

We propose PDNS, an end-point DNS monitoring system based on DNS sensor deployed at each host in a network, along with a centralized backend analysis server. To detect such attacks, PDNS expands the monitored DNS activity context and examines process context which triggered that activity. Specifically, each deployed PDNS sensor matches domain name and the IP address related to the DNS query with process ID, binary signature, loaded DLLs, and code signing information of the program that initiated it. We evaluate PDNS on a DNS activity dataset collected from 126 enterprise hosts and with data from multiple malware sources. Using ML Classifiers including DNN, our results outperform most previous works with high detection accuracy: a true positive rate at 98.55% and a low false positive rate at 0.03%.

View More Papers

SABRE: Protecting Bitcoin against Routing Attacks

Maria Apostolaki (ETH Zurich), Gian Marti (ETH Zurich), Jan Müller (ETH Zurich), Laurent Vanbever (ETH Zurich)

Read More

A Treasury System for Cryptocurrencies: Enabling Better Collaborative Intelligence

Bingsheng Zhang (Lancaster University), Roman Oliynykov (IOHK Ltd.), Hamed Balogun (Lancaster University)

Read More

YODA: Enabling computationally intensive contracts on blockchains with Byzantine...

Sourav Das (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi), Vinay Joseph Ribeiro (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi), Abhijeet Anand (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi)

Read More

Oligo-Snoop: A Non-Invasive Side Channel Attack Against DNA Synthesis...

Sina Faezi (University of California, Irvine), Sujit Rokka Chhetri (University of California, Irvine), Arnav Vaibhav Malawade (University of California, Irvine), John Charles Chaput (University of California, Irvine), William Grover (University of California, Riverside), Philip Brisk (University of California, Riverside), Mohammad Abdullah Al Faruque (University of California, Irvine)

Read More