P2PWNED: Modeling and Evaluating the Resilience of Peer-to-Peer Botnets Christian Rossow∗‡, Dennis Andriesse‡, Tillmann Werner¶, Brett Stone-Gross†, Daniel Plohmann§, Christian J. Dietrich∗, Herbert Bos‡ ∗ Institute for Internet Security, Gelsenkirchen, Germany {rossow,dietrich}@internet-sicherheit.de ‡ VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands {d.a.andriesse,h.j.bos}@vu.nl § Fraunhofer FKIE, Bonn, Germany,
[email protected] † Dell SecureWorks,
[email protected] ¶ CrowdStrike, Inc. Abstract—Centralized botnets are easy targets for takedown disrupted using the traditional approach of attacking critical efforts by computer security researchers and law enforcement. centralized infrastructure. Thus, botnet controllers have sought new ways to harden the Even though active P2P botnets such as the Zeus P2P infrastructures of their botnets. In order to meet this objective, some botnet operators have (re)designed their botnets to use variant, Sality, ZeroAccess and Kelihos have survived in the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructures. Many P2P botnets are far wild for as long as five years, relatively little is known about more resilient to takedown attempts than centralized botnets, the sizes of these botnets. It is difficult to estimate a P2P because they have no single points of failure. However, P2P botnets are subject to unique classes of attacks, such as node botnet’s size, for a number of reasons. P2P botnets often enumeration and poisoning. In this paper, we introduce a use custom protocols, so that researchers must first reverse formal graph model to capture the intrinsic properties and engineer the protocol and encryption before they can track fundamental vulnerabilities of P2P botnets. We apply our the botnet’s population.