Titan: Enabling Low Overhead and Multi-faceted Network Fingerprinting of a Bot

• Main Authors: Haq, Osama, Ahmed, Waqar, Syed, Affan A.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: botnets; containment policy; Context; Fingerprint recognition; IP networks; Logic gates; Malware; malware fingerprint; Ports (Computers); Sensors; software defined networking; testbed
• ISSN: 1530-0889; 2158-3927
• DOI: 10.1109/DSN.2014.20

Botnets are an evolutionary form of malware, unique in requiring network connectivity for herding by a botmaster that allows coordinated attacks as well as dynamic evasion from detection. Thus, the most interesting features of a bot relate to its rapidly evolving network behavior. The few academic and commercial malware observation systems that exist, however, are either proprietary or have large cost and management overhead. Moreover, the network behavior of bots changes considerably under different operational contexts. We first identify these various contexts that can impact its fingerprint. We then present Titan: a system that generates faithful network fingerprints by recreating all these contexts and stressing the bot with different network settings and host interactions. This effort includes a semi-automated and tunable containment policy to prevent bot proliferation. Most importantly, Titan has low cost overhead as a minimal setup requires just two machines, while the provision of a user-friendly web interface reduces the setup and management overhead. We then show a fingerprint of the Crypto locker bot to demonstrate automatic detection of its domain generation algorithm (DGA). We also demonstrate the effective identification of context specific behavior with a controlled deployment of Zeus botnet.