DNS Typo-squatting Domain Detection: A Data Analytics & Machine Learning Based Approach
This work is significant for organizations and individuals concerned with cybersecurity, as it provides a method to detect typosquatting, which can lead to corporate secret theft, information theft, or fraud.
The paper addresses the detection of DNS typosquatting attacks by proposing a machine learning-based approach. It utilizes exploratory data analytics on eight domain name-based features and develops a majority voting-based ensemble classifier. The classifier significantly reduces the number of potentially suspicious domains by almost a factor of five while maintaining detection accuracy.
Domain Name System (DNS) is a crucial component of current IP-based networks as it is the standard mechanism for name to IP resolution. However, due to its lack of data integrity and origin authentication processes, it is vulnerable to a variety of attacks. One such attack is Typosquatting. Detecting this attack is particularly important as it can be a threat to corporate secrets and can be used to steal information or commit fraud. In this paper, a machine learning-based approach is proposed to tackle the typosquatting vulnerability. To that end, exploratory data analytics is first used to better understand the trends observed in eight domain name-based extracted features. Furthermore, a majority voting-based ensemble learning classifier built using five classification algorithms is proposed that can detect suspicious domains with high accuracy. Moreover, the observed trends are validated by studying the same features in an unlabeled dataset using K-means clustering algorithm and through applying the developed ensemble learning classifier. Results show that legitimate domains have a smaller domain name length and fewer unique characters. Moreover, the developed ensemble learning classifier performs better in terms of accuracy, precision, and F-score. Furthermore, it is shown that similar trends are observed when clustering is used. However, the number of domains identified as potentially suspicious is high. Hence, the ensemble learning classifier is applied with results showing that the number of domains identified as potentially suspicious is reduced by almost a factor of five while still maintaining the same trends in terms of features' statistics.