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The paper introduces DNS-GT, a Transformer-based model that learns domain name embeddings from sequences of DNS queries by considering contextual information. It pre-trains the model in a self-supervised manner to capture general DNS activity behavior and then fine-tunes it for specific downstream tasks. Experiments on real-world DNS data demonstrate that DNS-GT achieves superior performance in domain name classification and botnet detection compared to existing baselines.
By modeling contextual relationships between DNS queries, DNS-GT significantly improves domain name embedding quality, leading to better performance in botnet detection and domain classification.
Network intrusion detection systems play a crucial role in the security strategy employed by organisations to detect and prevent cyberattacks. Such systems usually combine pattern detection signatures with anomaly detection techniques powered by machine learning methods. However, the commonly proposed machine learning methods present drawbacks such as over-reliance on labeled data and limited generalization capabilities. To address these issues, embedding-based methods have been introduced to learn representations from network data, such as DNS traffic, mainly due to its large availability, that generalise effectively to many downstream tasks. However, current approaches do not properly consider contextual information among DNS queries. In this paper, we tackle this issue by proposing DNS-GT, a novel Transformer-based model that learns embeddings for domain names from sequences of DNS queries. The model is first pre-trained in a self-supervised fashion in order to learn the general behavior of DNS activity. Then, it can be finetuned on specific downstream tasks, exploiting interactions with other relevant queries in a given sequence. Our experiments with real-world DNS data showcase the ability of our method to learn effective domain name representations. A quantitative evaluation on domain name classification and botnet detection tasks shows that our approach achieves better results compared to relevant baselines, creating opportunities for further exploration of large-scale language models for intrusion detection systems. Our code is available at: https://github.com/m-altieri/DNS-GT.
