Towards Accurate Node-Based Detection of P2P Botnets

Abstract

Botnets are a serious security threat to the current Internet infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a novel direction for P2P botnet detection called node-based detection. This approach focuses on the network characteristics of individual nodes. Based on our model, we examine node’s flows and extract the useful features over a given time period. We have tested our approach on real-life data sets and achieved detection rates of 99-100% and low false positives rates of 0–2%. Comparison with other similar approaches on the same data sets shows that our approach outperforms the existing approaches.