Detecting Internet Abuse by Analyzing Passive DNS Traffic: A Survey of Implemented Systems

Despite the ubiquitous role of domain name system (DNS) in sustaining the operations of various Internet services (domain name to IP address resolution, e-mail, Web), DNS was abused/misused to perform large-scale attacks that affected millions of Internet users. To detect and prevent threats associated to DNS, researchers introduced passive DNS replication and analysis as an effective alternative approach for analyzing live DNS traffic. In this paper, we survey state of the art systems that utilized passive DNS traffic for the purpose of detecting malicious behaviors on the Internet. We highlight the main strengths and weaknesses of the implemented systems through an in-depth analysis of the detection approach, collected data, and detection outcomes. We highlight an incremental implementation pattern in the studied systems with similarities in terms of the used datasets and detection approach. Furthermore, we show that almost all studied systems implemented supervised machine learning, which has its own limitations. In addition, while all surveyed systems required several hours or even days before detecting threats, we illustrate the ability to enhance performance by implementing a system prototype that utilizes big data analytics frameworks to detect threats in near real-time. We demonstrate the feasibility of our threat detection prototype through real-life examples, and provide further insights for future work toward analyzing DNS traffic in near real-time.