KALE A.R. AND SHIRBHATE D.D.

A "botnet" consists of a network of compromised computers controlled by an attacker ("botmaster"). Recently, botnets have be- come the root cause of many Internet attacks. To be well prepared for future attacks, it is not enough to study how to detect and defend against the botnets that have appeared in the past. Botnets have recently been identified as one of the most important threats to the security of the Internet. More importantly, we should study advanced botnet designs that could be developed by botmasters in the near future. In this paper, we present the design of an advanced hybrid peer-to-peer botnet. Compared with current botnets , the proposed botnet is harder to be shut down, monitored, and hijacked. It provides robust network connectivity, individualized encryption and control traffic dispersion, lim- ited botnet exposure by each bot, and easy monitoring and recovery by its botmaster. In the end, we suggest and analyze several possible defenses against this advanced botnet . Keywords- Botnet, peer-to-peer, robustness, honeypot