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Insights into DoH: Traffic Classification for DNS over HTTPS in an Encrypted Network

Published: 31 July 2023 Publication History

Abstract

In the past few years there has been a growing desire to provide more built in functionality to protect user communications from eavesdropping. An example of this is DNS over HTTPS (DoH) which can be used to protect user privacy, confidentiality and against spoofing attacks. Since its first popularity in 2018 as used in browsers, there is much further study to test the effectiveness of DoH in protection schemes and whether it is possible to detect the protocol over the web. Detecting DoH traffic among normal web traffic is also a major challenge for network admins to allow filtering of malicious traffic flows. In this paper, we investigate machine learning classification to study the detection of DoH traffic and further analyze the key feature characteristics in the protocol behavior to help researchers build credibility in the DoH protocol detection. Our study reveals key features and statistical relationships among DoH test runs on the Alexa-recommended 100 most-used websites using three different DoH servers, showing up to 98% test accuracy in our built classifier.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Unveiling DoH tunnel: Toward generating a balanced DoH encrypted traffic dataset and profiling malicious behavior using inherently interpretable machine learningPeer-to-Peer Networking and Applications10.1007/s12083-023-01597-417:1(507-531)Online publication date: 23-Dec-2023

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SNTA '23: Proceedings of the 2023 on Systems and Network Telemetry and Analytics
    July 2023
    32 pages
    ISBN:9798400701658
    DOI:10.1145/3589012
    Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of the United States government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

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    Published: 31 July 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. DNS over HTTPS
    2. encrypted DNS
    3. network protocol
    4. privacy
    5. statistical analysis

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    • (2023)Unveiling DoH tunnel: Toward generating a balanced DoH encrypted traffic dataset and profiling malicious behavior using inherently interpretable machine learningPeer-to-Peer Networking and Applications10.1007/s12083-023-01597-417:1(507-531)Online publication date: 23-Dec-2023

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