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An Analysis Method for Time-Based Features of Malicious Domains Based on Time Series Clustering

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Web Information Systems and Applications (WISA 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14094))

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Abstract

Malicious domains are widely used in network attacks. As DNS traffic features related to domain access time, time-based features of domains can describe the regularity of malicious activities but cannot be circumvented by attackers. These features are commonly used in malicious domain detection. Traditional detection methods generally use static statistical values in analyzing time-based features, but they ignore the temporal regularity of the features, thus resulting in inaccurate feature extraction. In view of this, in this paper, we proposed an analysis method for time-based features of malicious domains based on time series clustering. Firstly, density clustering is used to divide time intervals of time series to preserve the integrity of consecutive requests of malicious domains. Secondly, multiple time-based features are selected to depict malicious activity patterns. Thirdly, dynamic time warping and hierarchical clustering are applied as series similarity measure and clustering method respectively. The proposed method explores malicious domains by analyzing the similarity of time-based features series of different domains. Experimental results show that compared with the detection method using static statistical values, the accuracy and precision in this method improves from 88.49% to 96.30% and from 59.21% to 92.43% respectively, which proves that it can help detect malicious domains effectively.

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Acknowledgement

This work was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (2020YFB1805601) and the Research and Planning Project for Higher Education Science of China Association of Higher Education (22XX0403). The computing work in this paper was supported by the Public Service Platform of High Performance Computing by Network & Computation Center of HUST.

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Correspondence to Kunmei Wen .

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Yan, G., Wen, K., Hong, J., Liu, L., Zhou, L. (2023). An Analysis Method for Time-Based Features of Malicious Domains Based on Time Series Clustering. In: Yuan, L., Yang, S., Li, R., Kanoulas, E., Zhao, X. (eds) Web Information Systems and Applications. WISA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14094. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6222-8_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6222-8_29

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-99-6222-8

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