CO-DEFEND: Continuous Decentralized Federated Learning for Secure DoH-Based Threat Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Cajaraville-Aboy, Diego, Moure-Garrido, Marta, Beis-Penedo, Carlos, Garcia-Rubio, Carlos, Díaz-Redondo, Rebeca P., Campo, Celeste, Fernández-Vilas, Ana, Fernández-Veiga, Manuel
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Cajaraville-Aboy, Diego
Moure-Garrido, Marta
Beis-Penedo, Carlos
Garcia-Rubio, Carlos
Díaz-Redondo, Rebeca P.
Campo, Celeste
Fernández-Vilas, Ana
Fernández-Veiga, Manuel
author_facet Cajaraville-Aboy, Diego
Moure-Garrido, Marta
Beis-Penedo, Carlos
Garcia-Rubio, Carlos
Díaz-Redondo, Rebeca P.
Campo, Celeste
Fernández-Vilas, Ana
Fernández-Veiga, Manuel
contents The use of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) tunneling by an attacker to hide malicious activity within encrypted DNS traffic poses a serious threat to network security, as it allows malicious actors to bypass traditional monitoring and intrusion detection systems while evading detection by conventional traffic analysis techniques. Machine Learning (ML) techniques can be used to detect DoH tunnels; however, their effectiveness relies on large datasets containing both benign and malicious traffic. Sharing such datasets across entities is challenging due to privacy concerns. In this work, we propose CO-DEFEND (Continuous Decentralized Federated Learning for Secure DoH-Based Threat Detection), a Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) framework that enables multiple entities to collaboratively train a classification machine learning model while preserving data privacy and enhancing resilience against single points of failure. The proposed DFL framework, which is scalable and privacy-preserving, is based on a federation process that allows multiple entities to train online their local models using incoming DoH flows in real time as they are processed by the entity. In addition, we adapt four classical machine learning algorithms, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), Decision Trees (DT), and Random Forest (RF), for federated scenarios, comparing their results with more computationally complex alternatives such as neural networks. We compare our proposed method by using the dataset CIRA-CIC-DoHBrw-2020 with existing machine learning approaches to demonstrate its effectiveness in detecting malicious DoH tunnels and the benefits it brings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_01882
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CO-DEFEND: Continuous Decentralized Federated Learning for Secure DoH-Based Threat Detection
Cajaraville-Aboy, Diego
Moure-Garrido, Marta
Beis-Penedo, Carlos
Garcia-Rubio, Carlos
Díaz-Redondo, Rebeca P.
Campo, Celeste
Fernández-Vilas, Ana
Fernández-Veiga, Manuel
Machine Learning
The use of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) tunneling by an attacker to hide malicious activity within encrypted DNS traffic poses a serious threat to network security, as it allows malicious actors to bypass traditional monitoring and intrusion detection systems while evading detection by conventional traffic analysis techniques. Machine Learning (ML) techniques can be used to detect DoH tunnels; however, their effectiveness relies on large datasets containing both benign and malicious traffic. Sharing such datasets across entities is challenging due to privacy concerns. In this work, we propose CO-DEFEND (Continuous Decentralized Federated Learning for Secure DoH-Based Threat Detection), a Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) framework that enables multiple entities to collaboratively train a classification machine learning model while preserving data privacy and enhancing resilience against single points of failure. The proposed DFL framework, which is scalable and privacy-preserving, is based on a federation process that allows multiple entities to train online their local models using incoming DoH flows in real time as they are processed by the entity. In addition, we adapt four classical machine learning algorithms, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), Decision Trees (DT), and Random Forest (RF), for federated scenarios, comparing their results with more computationally complex alternatives such as neural networks. We compare our proposed method by using the dataset CIRA-CIC-DoHBrw-2020 with existing machine learning approaches to demonstrate its effectiveness in detecting malicious DoH tunnels and the benefits it brings.
title CO-DEFEND: Continuous Decentralized Federated Learning for Secure DoH-Based Threat Detection
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01882