417 research outputs found
Android HIV: A Study of Repackaging Malware for Evading Machine-Learning Detection
Machine learning based solutions have been successfully employed for
automatic detection of malware in Android applications. However, machine
learning models are known to lack robustness against inputs crafted by an
adversary. So far, the adversarial examples can only deceive Android malware
detectors that rely on syntactic features, and the perturbations can only be
implemented by simply modifying Android manifest. While recent Android malware
detectors rely more on semantic features from Dalvik bytecode rather than
manifest, existing attacking/defending methods are no longer effective. In this
paper, we introduce a new highly-effective attack that generates adversarial
examples of Android malware and evades being detected by the current models. To
this end, we propose a method of applying optimal perturbations onto Android
APK using a substitute model. Based on the transferability concept, the
perturbations that successfully deceive the substitute model are likely to
deceive the original models as well. We develop an automated tool to generate
the adversarial examples without human intervention to apply the attacks. In
contrast to existing works, the adversarial examples crafted by our method can
also deceive recent machine learning based detectors that rely on semantic
features such as control-flow-graph. The perturbations can also be implemented
directly onto APK's Dalvik bytecode rather than Android manifest to evade from
recent detectors. We evaluated the proposed manipulation methods for
adversarial examples by using the same datasets that Drebin and MaMadroid (5879
malware samples) used. Our results show that, the malware detection rates
decreased from 96% to 1% in MaMaDroid, and from 97% to 1% in Drebin, with just
a small distortion generated by our adversarial examples manipulation method.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figure
Eight years of rider measurement in the Android malware ecosystem: evolution and lessons learned
Despite the growing threat posed by Android malware,
the research community is still lacking a comprehensive
view of common behaviors and trends exposed by malware families
active on the platform. Without such view, the researchers
incur the risk of developing systems that only detect outdated
threats, missing the most recent ones. In this paper, we conduct
the largest measurement of Android malware behavior to date,
analyzing over 1.2 million malware samples that belong to 1.2K
families over a period of eight years (from 2010 to 2017). We
aim at understanding how the behavior of Android malware
has evolved over time, focusing on repackaging malware. In
this type of threats different innocuous apps are piggybacked
with a malicious payload (rider), allowing inexpensive malware
manufacturing.
One of the main challenges posed when studying repackaged
malware is slicing the app to split benign components apart from
the malicious ones. To address this problem, we use differential
analysis to isolate software components that are irrelevant to the
campaign and study the behavior of malicious riders alone. Our
analysis framework relies on collective repositories and recent
advances on the systematization of intelligence extracted from
multiple anti-virus vendors. We find that since its infancy in
2010, the Android malware ecosystem has changed significantly,
both in the type of malicious activity performed by the malicious
samples and in the level of obfuscation used by malware to avoid
detection. We then show that our framework can aid analysts
who attempt to study unknown malware families. Finally, we
discuss what our findings mean for Android malware detection
research, highlighting areas that need further attention by the
research community.Accepted manuscrip
Using HTML5 to Prevent Detection of Drive-by-Download Web Malware
The web is experiencing an explosive growth in the last years. New
technologies are introduced at a very fast-pace with the aim of narrowing the
gap between web-based applications and traditional desktop applications. The
results are web applications that look and feel almost like desktop
applications while retaining the advantages of being originated from the web.
However, these advancements come at a price. The same technologies used to
build responsive, pleasant and fully-featured web applications, can also be
used to write web malware able to escape detection systems. In this article we
present new obfuscation techniques, based on some of the features of the
upcoming HTML5 standard, which can be used to deceive malware detection
systems. The proposed techniques have been experimented on a reference set of
obfuscated malware. Our results show that the malware rewritten using our
obfuscation techniques go undetected while being analyzed by a large number of
detection systems. The same detection systems were able to correctly identify
the same malware in its original unobfuscated form. We also provide some hints
about how the existing malware detection systems can be modified in order to
cope with these new techniques.Comment: This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the article: \emph{Using
HTML5 to Prevent Detection of Drive-by-Download Web Malware}, which has been
published in final form at \url{http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/sec.1077}. This
article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley
Terms and Conditions for Self-Archivin
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)
Obfuscation-resilient Android Malware Analysis Based on Contrastive Learning
Due to its open-source nature, Android operating system has been the main
target of attackers to exploit. Malware creators always perform different code
obfuscations on their apps to hide malicious activities. Features extracted
from these obfuscated samples through program analysis contain many useless and
disguised features, which leads to many false negatives. To address the issue,
in this paper, we demonstrate that obfuscation-resilient malware analysis can
be achieved through contrastive learning. We take the Android malware
classification as an example to demonstrate our analysis. The key insight
behind our analysis is that contrastive learning can be used to reduce the
difference introduced by obfuscation while amplifying the difference between
malware and benign apps (or other types of malware).
Based on the proposed analysis, we design a system that can achieve robust
and interpretable classification of Android malware. To achieve robust
classification, we perform contrastive learning on malware samples to learn an
encoder that can automatically extract robust features from malware samples. To
achieve interpretable classification, we transform the function call graph of a
sample into an image by centrality analysis. Then the corresponding heatmaps
are obtained by visualization techniques. These heatmaps can help users
understand why the malware is classified as this family. We implement IFDroid
and perform extensive evaluations on two widely used datasets. Experimental
results show that IFDroid is superior to state-of-the-art Android malware
familial classification systems. Moreover, IFDroid is capable of maintaining
98.2% true positive rate on classifying 8,112 obfuscated malware samples
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