Towards Robust Domain Generation Algorithm Classification
Arthur Drichel Marc Meyer Ulrike Meyer
In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study on the robustness of domain
generation algorithm (DGA) classifiers. We implement 32 white-box attacks, 19
of which are very effective and induce a false-negative rate (FNR) of $\approx$
100\% on unhardened classifiers. To defend the classifiers, we evaluate
different hardening approaches and propose a novel training scheme that
leverages adversarial latent space vectors and discretized adversarial domains
to significantly improve robustness. In our study, we highlight a pitfall to
avoid when hardening classifiers and uncover training biases that can be easily
exploited by attackers to bypass detection, but which can be mitigated by
adversarial training (AT). In our study, we do not observe any trade-off
between robustness and performance, on the contrary, hardening improves a
classifier's detection performance for known and unknown DGAs. We implement all
attacks and defenses discussed in this paper as a standalone library, which we
make publicly available to facilitate hardening of DGA classifiers:
https://gitlab.com/rwth-itsec/robust-dga-detection