Detecting encrypted botnet traffic

Abstract

Bot detection methods that rely on deep packet inspection (DPI) can be foiled by encryption. Encryption, however, increases entropy. This paper investigates whether adding high-entropy detectors to an existing bot detection tool that uses DPI can restore some of the bot visibility.We present two high-entropy classifiers, and use one of them to enhance BotHunter. Our results show that while BotHunter misses about 50% of the bots when they employ encryption, our high-entropy classifier restores most of its ability to detect bots, even when they use encryption. © 2013 IEEE.

Publication Title

2013 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops, INFOCOM WKSHPS 2013

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