Review Article

Survey on Botnet Detection Techniques: Classification, Methods, and Evaluation

Table 3

Summary of typical botnet detection techniques based on complex networks.

PapersMechanismAlgorithm/modelDatasetAdvantageDrawback

PSI [83]High-order subgraph features based on PSI were extracted from malicious code, combined the classifier to detect the Internet of Things botnetSVM, RF, Bagging, DT, kNNIoTPOT [92]; VirusShare [93](i) Extracted the PSI subgraph from malicious code
(ii) The detection accuracy is greater than 97%
(i) It is difficult to capture malicious samples
BotGraph [84]For Large Scale Spamming botnet, a large user graph was constructed to reveal the correlation between botnet activities and bots were detected through abnormal behaviorMapReduce; Exponential Weighted Moving Average (EWMA)Hotmail registration log(i) Proposed a novel graph-based method to detect new Web account abuse attacks
(ii) A new distributed programming model, MapReduce, for building and analyzing large images
(i) The topology of the graph is large
(ii) The message cannot be detected before transmission
XIONG [88]In view of the anonymity of the zombie, according to the DNS query response, the mapping relationship between the domain name and IP was extracted by DNSmap tool, and the DNS correlation map was constructedDNSmapCTU(i) DNS traffic is small, detect early(i) For P2P botnets that do not conduct DNS query, the effect is not good
Light GBM algorithm is used to complete the classification of graph componentsLight GBMISCX-bot(ii) High-speed flow detection
PeerHunter [89]First, P2P traffic was filtered, MCG was constructed, and the community was mined through the community mining algorithm. Then, detection is carried out according to the statistical characteristics of the communityMapReduceCollected P2P data itself(i) An early approach to community behavior analysis(i) Need to manually adjust the community statistics
Louvain(ii) Good elasticity(ii) Does not work well against deep latency botnets
[91]According to the traffic, histogram and graph method were used to extract the key abnormal nodes, and then social association graph (SCG) was constructed, and community detection idea was used to detect robotsSCGCTU-13(i) Key nodes were identified and community similarity analysis is carried out(i) Not suitable for small-scale graph
LouvainCAIDA [94] xml(ii) The modularity measure function was optimized