Poster: Challenges of accurately measuring churn in P2P botnets

Peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets are known to be highly resilient to takedown attempts. Such attempts are usually carried out by exploiting vulnerabilities in the bots communication protocol. However, a failed takedown attempt may alert botmasters and allow them to patch their vulnerabilities to thwart subsequent attempts. As a promising solution, takedowns could be evaluated in simulation environments before attempting them in the real world. To ensure such simulations are as realistic as possible, the churn behavior of botnets must be understood and measured accurately. This paper discusses potential pitfalls when measuring churn in live P2P botnets and proposes a botnet monitoring framework for uniform data collection and churn measurement for P2P botnets.