Efficient Detection of Botnet Traffic by features selection and Decision Trees

Bibliographic Details
Title: Efficient Detection of Botnet Traffic by features selection and Decision Trees
Authors: Velasco-Mata, Javier, González-Castro, Víctor, Fidalgo, Eduardo, Alegre, Enrique
Publication Year: 2021
Collection: Computer Science
Subject Terms: Computer Science - Cryptography and Security, Computer Science - Machine Learning
More Details: Botnets are one of the online threats with the biggest presence, causing billionaire losses to global economies. Nowadays, the increasing number of devices connected to the Internet makes it necessary to analyze large amounts of network traffic data. In this work, we focus on increasing the performance on botnet traffic classification by selecting those features that further increase the detection rate. For this purpose we use two feature selection techniques, Information Gain and Gini Importance, which led to three pre-selected subsets of five, six and seven features. Then, we evaluate the three feature subsets along with three models, Decision Tree, Random Forest and k-Nearest Neighbors. To test the performance of the three feature vectors and the three models we generate two datasets based on the CTU-13 dataset, namely QB-CTU13 and EQB-CTU13. We measure the performance as the macro averaged F1 score over the computational time required to classify a sample. The results show that the highest performance is achieved by Decision Trees using a five feature set which obtained a mean F1 score of 85% classifying each sample in an average time of 0.78 microseconds.
Comment: Submitted to IEEE Access
Document Type: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1109/access.2021.3108222
Access URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2107.02896
Accession Number: edsarx.2107.02896
Database: arXiv
More Details
DOI:10.1109/access.2021.3108222