Toward a Safe and Secure Network Society (Professor KANAI Atsushi, Department of Applied InformaticsFaculty of Science and Engineering )

IEEE 8th Global Conference on Consumer Electronics (GCCE2019 ) Excellent Paper Award Outstanding Prize (Detection of Malicious Communication Using DNS Traffic Small features

Today, many things in addition to computers are connected to the Internet, and a vast number of devices are connected to the Internet. This situation is called IoT (Internet of Things). BOT-type malware that infects IoT devices is rapidly increasing, but it is currently very difficult to determine whether or not a device is infected with a BOT. Although it is not perfect, general-purpose computers can be protected to some extent by using antivirus software, but IoT devices are often in environments where antivirus software cannot be used, and they were not designed with security in mind to begin with. It is difficult to completely prevent and detect BOT infection.

Therefore, we proposed a method to detect malicious traffic by observing network traffic instead of detecting individual devices. The BOT malware communicates with a C&C server (command and control server) on the Internet to receive commands from the attacker. At this time, the malware uses the DNS protocol to obtain an IP address from a domain name. In this study, we focused on the DNS protocol used by BOTs and proposed a method to determine whether the packets are malicious or not, since the DNS protocol is a relatively simple method and it is possible to efficiently detect malicious traffic by observing DNS packets.

Specifically, we extracted some features from DNS packets and used a machine learning method called Random Forest (a type of AI) to determine whether a packet is malicious or not. The results show that it is very efficient and accurate in detecting malicious traffic.

The Information and Systems Society of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) Distinguished Activity Award (for contributions as editor-in-chief and editorial secretary of the Special Issue on Information and Communication Systems Security and editorial secretary of the English-language journal)

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) is Japan's largest academic society in the fields of electronics and ICT. It has a long history, dating back to 1911. There are six societies (Fundamentals and Boundary Society, NOLTA Society, Communications Society, Electronics Society, Information and Systems Society, and Human Communication Group) for each field.

Each society publishes two types of journals, one in Japanese and the other in English, and the journals of the four societies are divided into A (Fundamentals and Boundary), B (Communications), C (Electronics), and D (Information and Systems). The IEICE is one of the few Japanese academic societies that publish purely in English and is one of the few journals that meet the requirements for the Impact Factor. It is also one of the few journals in Japan that meet the requirements for an Impact Factor.

Each journal has its own editorial structure, which differs from the usual editorial structure, as each journal has a special issue for each detailed field. This award is presented to Dr. K. K. Kurokawa for his service as editor-in-chief, editorial secretary, and editorial board secretary of the "Special Issue on Information and Communication Systems Security," a special issue of the English-language D volume of the journal published by the Information and Systems Society.

This special issue is published annually and attracts submissions from all over the world of cutting-edge papers in the field of information and communication systems security. The editorial board is also composed of international members, and the papers are reviewed fairly and in detail, with strict consideration of COI and other relevant factors.