Multi-Instance Adversarial Attack on GNN-Based Malicious Domain Detection

Malicious domain detection (MDD) is an open security challenge that aims to detect if an Internet domain name is associated with cyber attacks. Many techniques have been applied to tackle this problem, among which graph neural networks (GNNs) are deemed one of the most effective approaches. GNN-based MDD employs domain name system (DNS) logs to represent Internet domains as nodes in a graph, dubbed domain maliciousness graph (DMG) and trains a GNN model to infer the maliciousness of Internet domains by leveraging the maliciousness of already identified ones. As this method heavily relies on the "publicly" accessible DNS logs to build DMGs, it creates a vulnerability for adversaries to manipulate the features and edges of their domain nodes within these graphs. The current body of literature primarily focuses on threat models that involve manipulating individual adversary (attacker) nodes. Nonetheless, adversaries usually create numerous domains to accomplish their attack objectives, aiming to reduce costs and evade detection. Hence, they aim to remain undetected across as many domains as possible. In this work, we call the attack that manipulates several nodes in the DMG concurrently a multi-instance evasion attack. To the best of our knowledge, this type of attack has not been explored in the prior art. We present both theoretical and empirical evidence to show that the existing single-instance evasion techniques for GNN-based MDDs are inadequate to launch multi-instance evasion attacks. Therefore, we propose an inference-time, multi-instance adversarial attack, dubbed MintA, against GNN-based MDD. MintA optimizes node perturbations to enhance the evasiveness of a node and its neighborhood. MintA only requires black-box access to the target model to launch the attack successfully. In other words, MintA does not require any knowledge of the MDD model’s parameters, architecture, or information on non-adversary nodes. We formulate an optimization problem that satisfies the attack objectives of MintA and devise an approximate solution for it. We evaluate MintA on a state-of-the-art GNN-based MDD technique using real-world data, and our experiments demonstrate an attack success rate of over 80%. The findings of this study serve as a cautionary note for security experts, highlighting the vulnerability of GNN-based MDD to practical attacks that can impede the effectiveness and advantages of this approach.