Botnet Command and Control Architectures Revisited: Tor Hidden Services and Fluxing

Abstract

Botnet armies constitute a major and continuous threat to the Internet. Their number, diversity, and power grows with each passing day, and the last years we are witnessing their rapid expansion to mobile and even IoT devices. The work at hand focuses on botnets which comprise mobile devices (e.g. smartphones), and aims to raise the alarm on a couple of advanced Command and Control (C&C) architectures that capitalize on Tor’s hidden services (HS) and DNS protocol. Via the use of such architectures, the goal of the perpetrator is dual; first to further obfuscate their identity and minimize the botnet’s forensic signal, and second to augment the resilience of their army. The novelty of the introduced architectures is that it does not rely on static C&C servers, but on rotating ones, which can be reached by other botnet members through their (varied) onion address. Also, we propose a scheme called “Tor fluxing”, which opposite to legacy IP or DNS fluxing, does not rely on A type of DNS resource records but on TXT ones. We demonstrate the soundness and effectiveness of the introduced C&C constructions via a proof-of-concept implementation.