Model:

The DNS Traffic Control Project is a machine learning project that aims to classify DNS traffic as either benign or malicious using stateless and stateful datasets. The purpose of this project is to build a model that can accurately detect and prevent malicious DNS traffic.

For this project, I used stateless and stateful datasets containing features related to DNS traffic suggested by the CIC-Bell-DNS-EXF-2021 Dataset. I used a merged combination of the datasets, both in light and heavy attacks. I used these datasets because they are readily available and provide a good starting point for building a DNS traffic classification model.

Samaneh Mahdavifar, Amgad Hanafy Salem, Princy Victor, Miguel Garzon, Amir H. Razavi, Natasha Hellberg, Arash Habibi Lashkari, “Lightweight Hybrid Detection of Data Exfiltration using DNS based on Machine Learning”, The 11th IEEE International Conference on Communication and Network Security (ICCNS), Dec. 3-5, 2021, Beijing Jiaotong University, Weihai, China.

To train the machine learning model, I defined the DNS anomalous detection class. This class has two possible values: 0 (benign) and 1 (malicious). I chose this class definition because it is a simple and intuitive way to classify DNS traffic.

To build the DNS traffic classification model, I used a Random Forest Classifier algorithm from the scikit-learn library. The Random Forest Classifier is a popular algorithm for classification tasks, and it has been shown to be effective in detecting malicious traffic.

I first merged the two datasets and shuffled the data to avoid bias. I also removed any rows with NaN values.

I then normalized the numerical data using a MinMaxScaler object from the scikit-learn library. I split the data into training and testing sets using a 80-20 split, respectively.

I trained the Random Forest Classifier with the training set and made predictions on the testing set. I then calculated the accuracy of the model using the accuracy_score function from the scikit-learn library.

To ensure that the model was not overfitting the data, I performed 5-fold cross-validation on the data. I used the cross_val_score function from the scikit-learn library to calculate the mean cross-validation score.

Finally, I plotted the feature importances to understand which features were most important in the classification task.

The DNS Traffic Control Project demonstrates how machine learning can be used to classify DNS traffic as either benign or malicious. By using stateless datasets and a Random Forest Classifier algorithm, I was able to build a model that accurately detected and prevented malicious DNS traffic.