Practical Attacks Against DNS Reputation Systems

DNS reputation systems are a critical layer of network defense that use ML to identify potentially malicious domains based on DNS-related behaviors. Despite their importance in protecting against spam, malware, and social engineering, little is known about the adversarial robustness of real-world DNS reputation systems. This work takes a first look at general attacks against DNS reputation systems. To overcome the black-box setting of deployed DNS reputation systems, we begin by creating an open-source reference DNS reputation system that 1) overcomes common pitfalls in data collection, preprocessing, training, and evaluation found in prior work, 2) approximates DNS reputation systems from prior research, and 3) enables future reproducible research. We find that general adversarial ML techniques are impractical due to a highly constrained input space, complex feature interdependencies, and difficult inversion from feature vectors to raw input samples. We then implement two classes of practical attacks, mimicry and popularity manipulation, that achieve high success rates against both our reference model and a popular commercial DNS reputation system, highlighting the transferability of the attacks to the real world. Finally, we develop constraint models that assess the time and financial cost required to execute our attacks. Using these models, we demonstrate that an adversary with US$10 can evade a leading security vendor with a 100% success rate in two weeks.