684 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
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
Effective methods to detect metamorphic malware: A systematic review
The succeeding code for metamorphic Malware is routinely rewritten to
remain stealthy and undetected within infected environments. This characteristic is
maintained by means of encryption and decryption methods, obfuscation through
garbage code insertion, code transformation and registry modification which makes
detection very challenging. The main objective of this study is to contribute an
evidence-based narrative demonstrating the effectiveness of recent proposals. Sixteen
primary studies were included in this analysis based on a pre-defined protocol. The
majority of the reviewed detection methods used Opcode, Control Flow Graph (CFG)
and API Call Graph. Key challenges facing the detection of metamorphic malware
include code obfuscation, lack of dynamic capabilities to analyse code and application
difficulty. Methods were further analysed on the basis of their approach, limitation,
empirical evidence and key parameters such as dataset, Detection Rate (DR) and
False Positive Rate (FPR)
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
Detecting Malicious Software By Dynamicexecution
Traditional way to detect malicious software is based on signature matching. However, signature matching only detects known malicious software. In order to detect unknown malicious software, it is necessary to analyze the software for its impact on the system when the software is executed. In one approach, the software code can be statically analyzed for any malicious patterns. Another approach is to execute the program and determine the nature of the program dynamically. Since the execution of malicious code may have negative impact on the system, the code must be executed in a controlled environment. For that purpose, we have developed a sandbox to protect the system. Potential malicious behavior is intercepted by hooking Win32 system calls. Using the developed sandbox, we detect unknown virus using dynamic instruction sequences mining techniques. By collecting runtime instruction sequences in basic blocks, we extract instruction sequence patterns based on instruction associations. We build classification models with these patterns. By applying this classification model, we predict the nature of an unknown program. We compare our approach with several other approaches such as simple heuristics, NGram and static instruction sequences. We have also developed a method to identify a family of malicious software utilizing the system call trace. We construct a structural system call diagram from captured dynamic system call traces. We generate smart system call signature using profile hidden Markov model (PHMM) based on modularized system call block. Smart system call signature weakly identifies a family of malicious software
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,
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