
almost any attackers. However, on the second day,
despite its size, the IP blacklist only blocks 7.3 per
cent of malicious traffic, while Kex-Filtering blocks
about 14.7 per cent of the same traffic. As already
discussed, the under-performance of the IP blacklist
may be due to a new botnet it did not include.
6.2 Overall Evaluation
Our experimental evaluation confirms the better per-
formance of Kex-Filtering provided that we adopt the
same update strategy of IP blacklists. As an exam-
ple, developments (Deri and Fusco, 2023) show that
a solution that merges the six most popular file-based
IP blacklists discovers less than 50 per cent of attack-
ers. Furthermore, current botnets such as the OutLaw
defeat conventional IP blacklists by launching attacks
from new hosts as they expand. Instead, evading Kex-
Filtering is more challenging because this requires up-
dating the SSH clients in the current botnet nodes with
a large overhead due to the sheer volume of botnet
nodes. Even the adoption of distinct SSH client con-
figurations for each victim node is highly complex as
it requires a large and diverse set of configurations
that should be properly managed. This results in a
large overhead for the botnet owner. Instead, Kex-
Filtering only requires a check against a small dataset
of hashes where each hash can block attacks from sev-
eral nodes. This enhances efficiency and it strength-
ens the defence against a broader range of attackers.
This is in stark contrast to IP blacklist which usually
involves tens of thousands of entries (i.e. the Alpha7
blacklist includes more than 54700 IPs), where each
one blocks attacks from a single host only. Further-
more, IP blacklists usually have a short life because
of the volatile nature of IP addresses. Instead, the life
of Kex hashes should be as long as one of the cur-
rent botnet nodes, offering reliable identification and
filtering with a low rate of false positives.
7 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE
WORK
Our experimental evaluation confirms the effec-
tiveness of Kex-Filtering a simpler technique than
IP filtering. However, given their relative merits,
we plan to integrate Kex and IP filtering to define
a more comprehensive solution for mitigating and
detecting attackers. A first example is the simple
IPS previously described that uses the output of
Kex-Filtering to update IP blacklists.
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