Detecting Zero-day Polymorphic Worms with Jaccard Similarity Algorithm

Zero-day polymorphic worms pose a serious threat to the security of Mobile systems and Internet infrastructure. In many cases, it is difficult to detect worm attacks at an early stage. There is typically little or no time to develop a well-constructed solution during such a worm outbreak. This is because the worms act only to spread from node to node and they bring security concerns to everyone using Internet via any static or mobile node. No system is safe from an aggressive worm crisis. However, many of the characteristics of a worm can be used to defeat it, including its predictable behavior and shared signatures. In this paper, we propose an efficient signature generation method based on string similarity algorithms to generate signatures for Zero-day polymorphic worms. Then, these signatures are practically applied to an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to prevent the network from such attacks. The experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed approach compared to other existing mechanisms

A STATE OF THE ART SURVEY ON POLYMORPHIC MALWARE ANALYSIS AND DETECTION TECHNIQUES

Nowadays, systems are under serious security threats caused by malicious software, commonly known as malware. Such malwares are sophisticatedly created with advanced techniques that make them hard to analyse and detect, thus causing a lot of damages. Polymorphism is one of the advanced techniques by which malware change their identity on each time they attack. This paper presents a detailed systematic and critical review that explores the available literature, and outlines the research efforts that have been made in relation to polymorphic malware analysis and their detection

Malware Resistant Data Protection in Hyper-connected Networks: A survey

Data protection is the process of securing sensitive information from being corrupted, compromised, or lost. A hyperconnected network, on the other hand, is a computer networking trend in which communication occurs over a network. However, what about malware. Malware is malicious software meant to penetrate private data, threaten a computer system, or gain unauthorised network access without the users consent. Due to the increasing applications of computers and dependency on electronically saved private data, malware attacks on sensitive information have become a dangerous issue for individuals and organizations across the world. Hence, malware defense is critical for keeping our computer systems and data protected. Many recent survey articles have focused on either malware detection systems or single attacking strategies variously. To the best of our knowledge, no survey paper demonstrates malware attack patterns and defense strategies combinedly. Through this survey, this paper aims to address this issue by merging diverse malicious attack patterns and machine learning (ML) based detection models for modern and sophisticated malware. In doing so, we focus on the taxonomy of malware attack patterns based on four fundamental dimensions the primary goal of the attack, method of attack, targeted exposure and execution process, and types of malware that perform each attack. Detailed information on malware analysis approaches is also investigated. In addition, existing malware detection techniques employing feature extraction and ML algorithms are discussed extensively. Finally, it discusses research difficulties and unsolved problems, including future research directions.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures, 7 tables, no where submitted ye

Toward Machine Intelligence that Learns to Fingerprint Polymorphic Worms in IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) is fast growing. Non-PC devices under the umbrella of IoT have been increasingly applied in various fields and will soon account for a significant share of total Internet traffic. However, the security and privacy of IoT and its devices have been challenged by malware, particularly polymorphic worms that rapidly self-propagate once being launched and vary their appearance over each infection to escape from the detection of signature-based intrusion detection systems. It is well recognized that polymorphic worms are one of the most intrusive threats to IoT security. To build an effective, strong defense for IoT networks against polymorphic worms, this research proposes a machine intelligent system, termed Gram-Restricted Boltzmann Machine (Gram-RBM), which automatically generates generic fingerprints/signatures for the polymorphic worm. Two augmented N-gram based methods are designed and applied in derivation of polymorphic wormsequences, also known as fingerprints/signatures. These derived sequences are then optimized using the Gaussian-Bernoulli RBM dimension reduction algorithm. The results, gained from the experiments involved three different types of polymorphicworms, show that the system generates accurate fingerprints/signatures even under "noisy" conditions and outperforms related methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency

a framework for automated similarity analysis of malware

Malware, a category of software including viruses, worms, and other malicious programs, is developed by hackers to damage, disrupt, or perform other harmful actions on data, computer systems and networks. Malware analysis, as an indispensable part of the work of IT security specialists, aims to gain an in-depth understanding of malware code. Manual analysis of malware is a very costly and time-consuming process. As more malware variants are evolved by hackers who occasionally use a copy-paste-modify programming style to accelerate the generation of large number of malware, the effort spent in analyzing similar pieces of malicious code has dramatically grown. One approach to remedy this situation is to automatically perform similarity analysis on malware samples and identify the functions they share in order to minimize duplicated effort in analyzing similar codes of malware variants. In this thesis, we present a framework to match cloned functions in a large chunk of malware samples. Firstly, the instructions of the functions to be analyzed are extracted from the disassembled malware binary code and then normalized. We propose a new similarity metric and use it to determine the pair-wise similarity among malware samples based on the calculated similarity of their functions. The developed tool also includes an API class recognizer designed to determine probable malicious operations that can be performed by malware functions. Furthermore, it allows us to visualize the relationship among functions inside malware codes and locate similar functions importing the same API class. We evaluate this framework on three malware datasets including metamorphic viruses created by malware generation tools, real-life malware variants in the wild, and two well-known botnet trojans. The obtained experimental results confirm that the proposed framework is effective in detecting similar malware code

A Review on Features’ Robustness in High Diversity Mobile Traffic Classifications

Mobile traffics are becoming more dominant due to growing usage of mobile devices and proliferation of IoT. The influx of mobile traffics introduce some new challenges in traffic classifications; namely the diversity complexity and behavioral dynamism complexity. Existing traffic classifications methods are designed for classifying standard protocols and user applications with more deterministic behaviors in small diversity. Currently, flow statistics, payload signature and heuristic traffic attributes are some of the most effective features used to discriminate traffic classes. In this paper, we investigate the correlations of these features to the less-deterministic user application traffic classes based on corresponding classification accuracy. Then, we evaluate the impact of large-scale classification on feature's robustness based on sign of diminishing accuracy. Our experimental results consolidate the needs for unsupervised feature learning to address the dynamism of mobile application behavioral traits for accurate classification on rapidly growing mobile traffics

Forensic identification and detection of hidden and obfuscated malware

The revolution in online criminal activities and malicious software (malware) has posed a serious challenge in malware forensics. Malicious attacks have become more organized and purposefully directed. With cybercrimes escalating to great heights in quantity as well as in sophistication and stealth, the main challenge is to detect hidden and obfuscated malware. Malware authors use a variety of obfuscation methods and specialized stealth techniques of information hiding to embed malicious code, to infect systems and to thwart any attempt to detect them, specifically with the use of commercially available anti-malware engines. This has led to the situation of zero-day attacks, where malware inflict systems even with existing security measures. The aim of this thesis is to address this situation by proposing a variety of novel digital forensic and data mining techniques to automatically detect hidden and obfuscated malware. Anti-malware engines use signature matching to detect malware where signatures are generated by human experts by disassembling the file and selecting pieces of unique code. Such signature based detection works effectively with known malware but performs poorly with hidden or unknown malware. Code obfuscation techniques, such as packers, polymorphism and metamorphism, are able to fool current detection techniques by modifying the parent code to produce offspring copies resulting in malware that has the same functionality, but with a different structure. These evasion techniques exploit the drawbacks of traditional malware detection methods, which take current malware structure and create a signature for detecting this malware in the future. However, obfuscation techniques aim to reduce vulnerability to any kind of static analysis to the determent of any reverse engineering process. Furthermore, malware can be hidden in file system slack space, inherent in NTFS file system based partitions, resulting in malware detection that even more difficult.Doctor of Philosoph