Paper 2023/1644

An End-to-End Framework for Private DGA Detection as a Service

Abstract

Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs) are used by malware to generate pseudorandom domain names to establish communication between infected bots and Command and Control servers. While DGAs can be detected by machine learning (ML) models with great accuracy, offering DGA detection as a service raises privacy concerns when requiring network administrators to disclose their DNS traffic to the service provider. We propose the first end-to-end framework for privacy-preserving classification as a service of domain names into DGA (malicious) or non-DGA (benign) domains. We achieve this through a combination of two privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), namely secure multi-party computation (MPC) and differential privacy (DP). Through MPC, our framework enables an enterprise network administrator to outsource the problem of classifying a DNS domain as DGA or non-DGA to an external organization without revealing any information about the domain name. Moreover, the service provider's ML model used for DGA detection is never revealed to the network administrator. Furthermore, by using DP, we also ensure that the classification result cannot be used to learn information about individual entries of the training data. Finally, we leverage the benefits of quantization of deep learning models in the context of MPC to achieve efficient, secure DGA detection. We demonstrate that we achieve a significant speed-up resulting in a 15% reduction in detection runtime without reducing accuracy.