505 research outputs found
Scalable malware clustering through coarse-grained behavior modeling
Anti-malware vendors receive several thousand new malware (malicious software) variants per day. Due to large volume of malware samples, it has become extremely important to group them based on their malicious characteristics. Grouping of malware variants that exhibit similar behavior helps to generate malware signatures more efficiently. Unfortunately, exponential growth of new malware variants and huge-dimensional feature space, as used in existing approaches, make the clustering task very challenging and difficult to scale. Furthermore, malware behavior modeling techniques proposed in the literature do not scale well, where malware feature space grows in proportion with the number of samples under examination. In this paper, we propose a scalable malware behavior modeling technique that models the interactions between malware and sensitive system resources in a coarse-grained manner. Coarse-grained behavior modeling enables us to generate malware feature space that does not grow in proportion with the number of samples under examination. A preliminary study shows that our approach generates 289 times less malware features and yet improves the average clustering accuracy by 6.20% comparing to a state-of-the-art malware clustering technique
Android Malware Clustering through Malicious Payload Mining
Clustering has been well studied for desktop malware analysis as an effective
triage method. Conventional similarity-based clustering techniques, however,
cannot be immediately applied to Android malware analysis due to the excessive
use of third-party libraries in Android application development and the
widespread use of repackaging in malware development. We design and implement
an Android malware clustering system through iterative mining of malicious
payload and checking whether malware samples share the same version of
malicious payload. Our system utilizes a hierarchical clustering technique and
an efficient bit-vector format to represent Android apps. Experimental results
demonstrate that our clustering approach achieves precision of 0.90 and recall
of 0.75 for Android Genome malware dataset, and average precision of 0.98 and
recall of 0.96 with respect to manually verified ground-truth.Comment: Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Research in
Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID 2017
Advanced Security Analysis for Emergent Software Platforms
Emergent software ecosystems, boomed by the advent of smartphones and the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, are perpetually sophisticated, deployed into highly dynamic environments, and facilitating interactions across heterogeneous domains. Accordingly, assessing the security thereof is a pressing need, yet requires high levels of scalability and reliability to handle the dynamism involved in such volatile ecosystems.
This dissertation seeks to enhance conventional security detection methods to cope with the emergent features of contemporary software ecosystems. In particular, it analyzes the security of Android and IoT ecosystems by developing rigorous vulnerability detection methods. A critical aspect of this work is the focus on detecting vulnerable and unsafe interactions between applications that share common components and devices. Contributions of this work include novel insights and methods for: (1) detecting vulnerable interactions between Android applications that leverage dynamic loading features for concealing the interactions; (2) identifying unsafe interactions between smart home applications by considering physical and cyber channels; (3) detecting malicious IoT applications that are developed to target numerous IoT devices; (4) detecting insecure patterns of emergent security APIs that are reused from open-source software. In all of the four research thrusts, we present thorough security analysis and extensive evaluations based on real-world applications. Our results demonstrate that the proposed detection mechanisms can efficiently and effectively detect vulnerabilities in contemporary software platforms.
Advisers: Hamid Bagheri and Qiben Ya
A Survey on Enterprise Network Security: Asset Behavioral Monitoring and Distributed Attack Detection
Enterprise networks that host valuable assets and services are popular and
frequent targets of distributed network attacks. In order to cope with the
ever-increasing threats, industrial and research communities develop systems
and methods to monitor the behaviors of their assets and protect them from
critical attacks. In this paper, we systematically survey related research
articles and industrial systems to highlight the current status of this arms
race in enterprise network security. First, we discuss the taxonomy of
distributed network attacks on enterprise assets, including distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) and reconnaissance attacks. Second, we review existing
methods in monitoring and classifying network behavior of enterprise hosts to
verify their benign activities and isolate potential anomalies. Third,
state-of-the-art detection methods for distributed network attacks sourced from
external attackers are elaborated, highlighting their merits and bottlenecks.
Fourth, as programmable networks and machine learning (ML) techniques are
increasingly becoming adopted by the community, their current applications in
network security are discussed. Finally, we highlight several research gaps on
enterprise network security to inspire future research.Comment: Journal paper submitted to Elseive
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