Less is More: Robust and Novel Features for Malicious Domain Detection

Malicious domains are increasingly common and pose a severe cybersecurity threat. Specifically, many types of current cyber attacks use URLs for attack communications (e.g., C&C, phishing, and spear-phishing). Despite the continuous progress in detecting these attacks, many alarming problems remain open, such as the weak spots of the defense mechanisms. Since machine learning has become one of the most prominent methods of malware detection, A robust feature selection mechanism is proposed that results in malicious domain detection models that are resistant to evasion attacks. This mechanism exhibits high performance based on empirical data. This paper makes two main contributions: First, it provides an analysis of robust feature selection based on widely used features in the literature. Note that even though the feature set dimensional space is reduced by half (from nine to four features), the performance of the classifier is still improved (an increase in the model's F1-score from 92.92% to 95.81%). Second, it introduces novel features that are robust to the adversary's manipulation. Based on an extensive evaluation of the different feature sets and commonly used classification models, this paper shows that models that are based on robust features are resistant to malicious perturbations, and at the same time useful for classifying non-manipulated data.