Malicious DNS Tunneling Detection in Real-Traffic DNS Data

While originally not intended for data transfer, the Domain Name System (DNS) is currently used to this end anyway, in a process called DNS tunneling (DNST). Malicious users exploit DNST for data exfiltration from infected machines, posing a critical security threat. We train and evaluate state-of-the-art convolutional neural network, random forest, and ensemble classifiers to detect tunneling in DNS traffic. Finally, we assess the classifiers' performance and robustness by exposing them to one day of real-traffic data.