Making Use of NXt to Nothing: The Effect of Class Imbalances on DGA Detection Classifiers

Numerous machine learning classifiers have been proposed for binary classification of domain names as either benign or malicious, and even for multiclass classification to identify the domain generation algorithm (DGA) that generated a specific domain name. Both classification tasks have to deal with the class imbalance problem of strongly varying amounts of training samples per DGA. Currently, it is unclear whether the inclusion of DGAs for which only a few samples are known to the training sets is beneficial or harmful to the overall performance of the classifiers. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive analysis of various contextless DGA classifiers, which reveals the high value of a few training samples per class for both classification tasks. We demonstrate that the classifiers are able to detect various DGAs with high probability by including the underrepresented classes which were previously hardly recognizable. Simultaneously, we show that the classifiers' detection capabilities of well represented classes do not decrease.

Analyzing the Real-World Applicability of DGA Classifiers

Separating benign domains from domains generated by DGAs with the help of a binary classifier is a well-studied problem for which promising performance results have been published. The corresponding multiclass task of determining the exact DGA that generated a domain enabling targeted remediation measures is less well studied. Selecting the most promising classifier for these tasks in practice raises a number of questions that have not been addressed in prior work so far. These include the questions on which traffic to train in which network and when, just as well as how to assess robustness against adversarial attacks. Moreover, it is unclear which features lead a classifier to a decision and whether the classifiers are real-time capable. In this paper, we address these issues and thus contribute to bringing DGA detection classifiers closer to practical use. In this context, we propose one novel classifier based on residual neural networks for each of the two tasks and extensively evaluate them as well as previously proposed classifiers in a unified setting. We not only evaluate their classification performance but also compare them with respect to explainability, robustness, and training and classification speed. Finally, we show that our newly proposed binary classifier generalizes well to other networks, is time-robust, and able to identify previously unknown DGAs.