3,149 research outputs found
Mal-Netminer: Malware Classification Approach based on Social Network Analysis of System Call Graph
As the security landscape evolves over time, where thousands of species of
malicious codes are seen every day, antivirus vendors strive to detect and
classify malware families for efficient and effective responses against malware
campaigns. To enrich this effort, and by capitalizing on ideas from the social
network analysis domain, we build a tool that can help classify malware
families using features driven from the graph structure of their system calls.
To achieve that, we first construct a system call graph that consists of system
calls found in the execution of the individual malware families. To explore
distinguishing features of various malware species, we study social network
properties as applied to the call graph, including the degree distribution,
degree centrality, average distance, clustering coefficient, network density,
and component ratio. We utilize features driven from those properties to build
a classifier for malware families. Our experimental results show that
influence-based graph metrics such as the degree centrality are effective for
classifying malware, whereas the general structural metrics of malware are less
effective for classifying malware. Our experiments demonstrate that the
proposed system performs well in detecting and classifying malware families
within each malware class with accuracy greater than 96%.Comment: Mathematical Problems in Engineering, Vol 201
Unsupervised Anomaly-based Malware Detection using Hardware Features
Recent works have shown promise in using microarchitectural execution
patterns to detect malware programs. These detectors belong to a class of
detectors known as signature-based detectors as they catch malware by comparing
a program's execution pattern (signature) to execution patterns of known
malware programs. In this work, we propose a new class of detectors -
anomaly-based hardware malware detectors - that do not require signatures for
malware detection, and thus can catch a wider range of malware including
potentially novel ones. We use unsupervised machine learning to build profiles
of normal program execution based on data from performance counters, and use
these profiles to detect significant deviations in program behavior that occur
as a result of malware exploitation. We show that real-world exploitation of
popular programs such as IE and Adobe PDF Reader on a Windows/x86 platform can
be detected with nearly perfect certainty. We also examine the limits and
challenges in implementing this approach in face of a sophisticated adversary
attempting to evade anomaly-based detection. The proposed detector is
complementary to previously proposed signature-based detectors and can be used
together to improve security.Comment: 1 page, Latex; added description for feature selection in Section 4,
results unchange
A Multi-view Context-aware Approach to Android Malware Detection and Malicious Code Localization
Existing Android malware detection approaches use a variety of features such
as security sensitive APIs, system calls, control-flow structures and
information flows in conjunction with Machine Learning classifiers to achieve
accurate detection. Each of these feature sets provides a unique semantic
perspective (or view) of apps' behaviours with inherent strengths and
limitations. Meaning, some views are more amenable to detect certain attacks
but may not be suitable to characterise several other attacks. Most of the
existing malware detection approaches use only one (or a selected few) of the
aforementioned feature sets which prevent them from detecting a vast majority
of attacks. Addressing this limitation, we propose MKLDroid, a unified
framework that systematically integrates multiple views of apps for performing
comprehensive malware detection and malicious code localisation. The rationale
is that, while a malware app can disguise itself in some views, disguising in
every view while maintaining malicious intent will be much harder.
MKLDroid uses a graph kernel to capture structural and contextual information
from apps' dependency graphs and identify malice code patterns in each view.
Subsequently, it employs Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) to find a weighted
combination of the views which yields the best detection accuracy. Besides
multi-view learning, MKLDroid's unique and salient trait is its ability to
locate fine-grained malice code portions in dependency graphs (e.g.,
methods/classes). Through our large-scale experiments on several datasets
(incl. wild apps), we demonstrate that MKLDroid outperforms three
state-of-the-art techniques consistently, in terms of accuracy while
maintaining comparable efficiency. In our malicious code localisation
experiments on a dataset of repackaged malware, MKLDroid was able to identify
all the malice classes with 94% average recall
Learning Fast and Slow: PROPEDEUTICA for Real-time Malware Detection
In this paper, we introduce and evaluate PROPEDEUTICA, a novel methodology
and framework for efficient and effective real-time malware detection,
leveraging the best of conventional machine learning (ML) and deep learning
(DL) algorithms. In PROPEDEUTICA, all software processes in the system start
execution subjected to a conventional ML detector for fast classification. If a
piece of software receives a borderline classification, it is subjected to
further analysis via more performance expensive and more accurate DL methods,
via our newly proposed DL algorithm DEEPMALWARE. Further, we introduce delays
to the execution of software subjected to deep learning analysis as a way to
"buy time" for DL analysis and to rate-limit the impact of possible malware in
the system. We evaluated PROPEDEUTICA with a set of 9,115 malware samples and
877 commonly used benign software samples from various categories for the
Windows OS. Our results show that the false positive rate for conventional ML
methods can reach 20%, and for modern DL methods it is usually below 6%.
However, the classification time for DL can be 100X longer than conventional ML
methods. PROPEDEUTICA improved the detection F1-score from 77.54% (conventional
ML method) to 90.25%, and reduced the detection time by 54.86%. Further, the
percentage of software subjected to DL analysis was approximately 40% on
average. Further, the application of delays in software subjected to ML reduced
the detection time by approximately 10%. Finally, we found and discussed a
discrepancy between the detection accuracy offline (analysis after all traces
are collected) and on-the-fly (analysis in tandem with trace collection). Our
insights show that conventional ML and modern DL-based malware detectors in
isolation cannot meet the needs of efficient and effective malware detection:
high accuracy, low false positive rate, and short classification time.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure
Machine Learning Aided Static Malware Analysis: A Survey and Tutorial
Malware analysis and detection techniques have been evolving during the last
decade as a reflection to development of different malware techniques to evade
network-based and host-based security protections. The fast growth in variety
and number of malware species made it very difficult for forensics
investigators to provide an on time response. Therefore, Machine Learning (ML)
aided malware analysis became a necessity to automate different aspects of
static and dynamic malware investigation. We believe that machine learning
aided static analysis can be used as a methodological approach in technical
Cyber Threats Intelligence (CTI) rather than resource-consuming dynamic malware
analysis that has been thoroughly studied before. In this paper, we address
this research gap by conducting an in-depth survey of different machine
learning methods for classification of static characteristics of 32-bit
malicious Portable Executable (PE32) Windows files and develop taxonomy for
better understanding of these techniques. Afterwards, we offer a tutorial on
how different machine learning techniques can be utilized in extraction and
analysis of a variety of static characteristic of PE binaries and evaluate
accuracy and practical generalization of these techniques. Finally, the results
of experimental study of all the method using common data was given to
demonstrate the accuracy and complexity. This paper may serve as a stepping
stone for future researchers in cross-disciplinary field of machine learning
aided malware forensics.Comment: 37 Page
On the Feasibility of Malware Authorship Attribution
There are many occasions in which the security community is interested to
discover the authorship of malware binaries, either for digital forensics
analysis of malware corpora or for thwarting live threats of malware invasion.
Such a discovery of authorship might be possible due to stylistic features
inherent to software codes written by human programmers. Existing studies of
authorship attribution of general purpose software mainly focus on source code,
which is typically based on the style of programs and environment. However,
those features critically depend on the availability of the program source
code, which is usually not the case when dealing with malware binaries. Such
program binaries often do not retain many semantic or stylistic features due to
the compilation process. Therefore, authorship attribution in the domain of
malware binaries based on features and styles that will survive the compilation
process is challenging. This paper provides the state of the art in this
literature. Further, we analyze the features involved in those techniques. By
using a case study, we identify features that can survive the compilation
process. Finally, we analyze existing works on binary authorship attribution
and study their applicability to real malware binaries.Comment: FPS 201
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