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)

DRLDO A Novel DRL based De obfuscation System for Defence Against Metamorphic Malware

In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism to normalise metamorphic and obfuscated malware down at the opcode level and hence create an advanced metamorphic malware de-obfuscation and defence system. We name this system as DRLDO, for deep reinforcement learning based de-obfuscator. With the inclusion of the DRLDO as a sub-component, an existing Intrusion Detection System could be augmented with defensive capabilities against ‘zero-day’ attack from obfuscated and metamorphic variants of existing malware. This gains importance, not only because there exists no system till date that use advance DRL to intelligently and automatically normalise obfuscation down even to the opcode level, but also because the DRLDO system does not mandate any changes to the existing IDS. The DRLDO system does not even mandate the IDS’ classifier to be retrained with any new dataset containing obfuscated samples. Hence DRLDO could be easily retrofitted into any existing IDS deployment. We designed, developed, and conducted experiments on the system to evaluate the same against multiple-simultaneous attacks from obfuscations generated from malware samples from a standardised dataset that contain multiple generations of malware. Experimental results prove that DRLDO was able to successfully make the otherwise undetectable obfuscated variants of the malware detectable by an existing pre-trained malware classifier. The detection probability was raised well above the cut-off mark to 0.6 for the classifier to detect the obfuscated malware unambiguously. Further, the de-obfuscated variants generated by DRLDO achieved a very high correlation (of ≈ 0.99) with the base malware. This observation validates that the DRLDO system is actually learning to de-obfuscate and not exploiting a trivial trick

Data Augmentation Based Malware Detection using Convolutional Neural Networks

Recently, cyber-attacks have been extensively seen due to the everlasting increase of malware in the cyber world. These attacks cause irreversible damage not only to end-users but also to corporate computer systems. Ransomware attacks such as WannaCry and Petya specifically targets to make critical infrastructures such as airports and rendered operational processes inoperable. Hence, it has attracted increasing attention in terms of volume, versatility, and intricacy. The most important feature of this type of malware is that they change shape as they propagate from one computer to another. Since standard signature-based detection software fails to identify this type of malware because they have different characteristics on each contaminated computer. This paper aims at providing an image augmentation enhanced deep convolutional neural network (CNN) models for the detection of malware families in a metamorphic malware environment. The main contributions of the paper's model structure consist of three components, including image generation from malware samples, image augmentation, and the last one is classifying the malware families by using a convolutional neural network model. In the first component, the collected malware samples are converted binary representation to 3-channel images using windowing technique. The second component of the system create the augmented version of the images, and the last component builds a classification model. In this study, five different deep convolutional neural network model for malware family detection is used.Comment: 18 page

Texture Based Malware Pattern Identification and Classification

Malware texture pattern plays an essential role in defense against malicious instructions which were analyzed by malware analyst. It is identified as a security threat. Classifying malware samples based on static analysis which is a challenging task. This paper introduces an approach to classify malware variants as a gray scale image based on texture features such as different patterns of malware samples. Malicious samples are classified through the machine learning techniques. The proposed method experimented on malware dataset which is consisting of large number of malware samples. The similarities are calculated by texture analysis methods with Euclidian distance for various variants of malware families. The available samples are named by the Antivirus companies which can analyze through supervised learning techniques. The experimental results show that the effective identification of malware texture pattern through the image processing which gives better accuracy results compared to existing work

MDFRCNN: Malware Detection using Faster Region Proposals Convolution Neural Network

Technological advancement of smart devices has opened up a new trend: Internet of Everything (IoE), where all devices are connected to the web. Large scale networking benefits the community by increasing connectivity and giving control of physical devices. On the other hand, there exists an increased ‘Threat’ of an ‘Attack’. Attackers are targeting these devices, as it may provide an easier ‘backdoor entry to the users’ network’.MALicious softWARE (MalWare) is a major threat to user security. Fast and accurate detection of malware attacks are the sine qua non of IoE, where large scale networking is involved. The paper proposes use of a visualization technique where the disassembled malware code is converted into gray images, as well as use of Image Similarity based Statistical Parameters (ISSP) such as Normalized Cross correlation (NCC), Average difference (AD), Maximum difference (MaxD), Singular Structural Similarity Index Module (SSIM), Laplacian Mean Square Error (LMSE), MSE and PSNR. A vector consisting of gray image with statistical parameters is trained using a Faster Region proposals Convolution Neural Network (F-RCNN) classifier. The experiment results are promising as the proposed method includes ISSP with F-RCNN training. Overall training time of learning the semantics of higher-level malicious behaviors is less. Identification of malware (testing phase) is also performed in less time. The fusion of image and statistical parameter enhances system performance with greater accuracy. The benchmark database from Microsoft Malware Classification challenge has been used to analyze system performance, which is available on the Kaggle website. An overall average classification accuracy of 98.12% is achieved by the proposed method

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

Applications in security and evasions in machine learning : a survey

In recent years, machine learning (ML) has become an important part to yield security and privacy in various applications. ML is used to address serious issues such as real-time attack detection, data leakage vulnerability assessments and many more. ML extensively supports the demanding requirements of the current scenario of security and privacy across a range of areas such as real-time decision-making, big data processing, reduced cycle time for learning, cost-efficiency and error-free processing. Therefore, in this paper, we review the state of the art approaches where ML is applicable more effectively to fulfill current real-world requirements in security. We examine different security applications' perspectives where ML models play an essential role and compare, with different possible dimensions, their accuracy results. By analyzing ML algorithms in security application it provides a blueprint for an interdisciplinary research area. Even with the use of current sophisticated technology and tools, attackers can evade the ML models by committing adversarial attacks. Therefore, requirements rise to assess the vulnerability in the ML models to cope up with the adversarial attacks at the time of development. Accordingly, as a supplement to this point, we also analyze the different types of adversarial attacks on the ML models. To give proper visualization of security properties, we have represented the threat model and defense strategies against adversarial attack methods. Moreover, we illustrate the adversarial attacks based on the attackers' knowledge about the model and addressed the point of the model at which possible attacks may be committed. Finally, we also investigate different types of properties of the adversarial attacks