DGA CapsNet: 1D Application of Capsule Networks to DGA Detection

Domain generation algorithms (DGAs) represent a class of malware used to generate large numbers of new domain names to achieve command-and-control (C2) communication between the malware program and its C2 server to avoid detection by cybersecurity measures. Deep learning has proven successful in serving as a mechanism to implement real-time DGA detection, specifically through the use of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). This paper compares several state-of-the-art deep-learning implementations of DGA detection found in the literature with two novel models: a deeper CNN model and a one-dimensional (1D) Capsule Networks (CapsNet) model. The comparison shows that the 1D CapsNet model performs as well as the best-performing model from the literature.