MACSPMD:基于恶意API调用序列模式挖掘的恶意代码检测

基于动态分析的恶意代码检测方法由于能有效对抗恶意代码的多态和代码混淆技术,而且可以检测新的未知恶意代码等,因此得到了研究者的青睐。在这种情况下,恶意代码的编写者通过在恶意代码中嵌入大量反检测功能来逃避现有恶意代码动态检测方法的检测。针对该问题,提出了基于恶意API调用序列模式挖掘的恶意代码检测方法MACSPMD。首先,使用真机模拟恶意代码的实际运行环境来获取文件的动态API调用序列;其次,引入面向目标关联挖掘的概念,以挖掘出能够代表潜在恶意行为模式的恶意API调用序列模式;最后,将挖掘到的恶意API调用序列模式作为异常行为特征进行恶意代码的检测。基于真实数据集的实验结果表明,MACSPMD对未知和逃避型恶意代码进行检测的准确率分别达到了94.55%和97.73%,比其他基于API调用数据的恶意代码检测方法 的准确率分别提高了2.47%和2.66%,且挖掘过程消耗的时间更少。因此,MACSPMD能有效检测包括逃避型在内的已知和未知恶意代码。     

Security implications of running windows software on a Linux system using Wine: a malware analysis study

Linux is considered to be less prone to malware compared to other operating systems, and as a result Linux users rarely run anti-malware. However, many popular software applications released on other platforms cannot run natively on Linux. Wine is a popular compatibility layer for running Windows programs on Linux. The level of security risk that Wine poses to Linux users is largely undocumented. This project was conducted to assess the security implications of using Wine, and to determine if any specific types of malware or malware behavior have a significant effect on the malware being successful in Wine. Dynamic analysis (both automated and manual) was applied to 30 malware samples both in a Windows environment and Linux environment running Wine. Behavior analyzed included file system, registry, and network access, and the spawning of processes, and services. The behavior was compared to determine malware success in Wine. The study results provide evidence that Wine can pose serious security implications when used to run Windows software in a Linux environment. Five samples of Windows malware were run successfully through Wine on a Linux system. No significant relationships were discovered between the success of the malware and its high-level behavior or malware type. However, certain API calls could not be recreated in a Linux environment, and led to failure of malware to execute via Wine. This suggests that particular malware samples that utilize these API calls will never run completely successfully in a Linux environment. As a consequence, the success of some samples can be determined from observing the API calls when run within a Windows environment.

     

Behavior-based features model for malware detection

The sharing of malicious code libraries and techniques over the Internet has vastly increased the release of new malware variants in an unprecedented rate. Malware variants share similar behaviors yet they have different syntactic structure due to the incorporation of many obfuscation and code change techniques such as polymorphism and metamorphism. The different structure of malware variants poses a serious problem to signature-based detection technique, yet their similar exhibited behaviors and actions can be a remarkable feature to detect them by behavior-based techniques. Malware instances also largely depend on API calls provided by the operating system to achieve their malicious tasks. Therefore, behavior-based detection techniques that utilize API calls are promising for the detection of malware variants. In this paper, we propose a behavior-based features model that describes malicious action exhibited by malware instance. To extract the proposed model, we first perform dynamic analysis on a relatively recent malware dataset inside a controlled virtual environment and capture traces of API calls invoked by malware instances. The traces are then generalized into high-level features we refer to as actions. We assessed the viability of actions by various classification algorithms such as decision tree, random forests, and support vector machine. The experimental results demonstrate that the classifiers attain high accuracy and satisfactory results in the detection of malware variants.     

On Locating Malicious Code in Piggybacked Android Apps

To devise efficient approaches and tools for detecting malicious packages in the Android ecosystem, researchers are increasingly required to have a deep understanding of malware. There is thus a need to provide a framework for dissecting malware and locating malicious program fragments within app code in order to build a comprehensive dataset of malicious samples. Towards addressing this need, we propose in this work a tool-based approach called HookRanker, which provides ranked lists of potentially malicious packages based on the way malware behaviour code is triggered. With experiments on a ground truth of piggybacked apps, we are able to automatically locate the malicious packages from piggybacked Android apps with an accuracy@5 of 83.6% for such packages that are triggered through method invocations and an accuracy@5 of 82.2% for such packages that are triggered independently.     

Ring 0级程序行为分析系统的设计与实现

提出一种Windows平台下基于虚拟机的Ring 0级程序行为分析架构,据此架构设计和实现程序行为自动分析系统Malbox。该系统能够在封闭的虚拟环境下自动地检测和分析待测程序的进程、文件、注册表、网络等行为。经过测试,该系统能够较好地检测程序的本机和网络行为,具有较高的实用性。     

Malware detection using assembly and API call sequences

One of the major problems concerning information assurance is malicious code. To evade detection, malware has also been encrypted or obfuscated to produce variants that continue to plague properly defended and patched networks with zero day exploits. With malware and malware authors using obfuscation techniques to generate automated polymorphic and metamorphic versions, anti-virus software must always keep up with their samples and create a signature that can recognize the new variants. Creating a signature for each variant in a timely fashion is a problem that anti-virus companies face all the time. In this paper we present detection algorithms that can help the anti-virus community to ensure a variant of a known malware can still be detected without the need of creating a signature; a similarity analysis (based on specific quantitative measures) is performed to produce a matrix of similarity scores that can be utilized to determine the likelihood that a piece of code under inspection contains a particular malware. Two general malware detection methods presented in this paper are: Static Analyzer for Vicious Executables (SAVE) and Malware Examiner using Disassembled Code (MEDiC). MEDiC uses assembly calls for analysis and SAVE uses API calls (Static API call sequence and Static API call set) for analysis. We show where Assembly can be superior to API calls in that it allows a more detailed comparison of executables. API calls, on the other hand, can be superior to Assembly for its speed and its smaller signature. Our two proposed techniques are implemented in SAVE) and MEDiC. We present experimental results that indicate that both of our proposed techniques can provide a better detection performance against obfuscated malware. We also found a few false positives, such as those programs that use network functions (e.g. PuTTY) and encrypted programs (no API calls or assembly functions are found in the source code) when the thresholds are set 50% similarity measure. However, these false positives can be minimized, for example by changing the threshold value to 70% that determines whether a program falls in the malicious category or not.     

Exposing mobile malware from the inside (or what is your mobile app really doing?)

It is without a doubt that malware especially designed for modern mobile platforms is rapidly becoming a serious threat. The problem is further multiplexed by the growing convergence of wired, wireless and cellular networks, since virus writers can now develop sophisticated malicious software that is able to migrate across network domains. This is done in an effort to exploit vulnerabilities and services specific to each network. So far, research in dealing with this risk has concentrated on the Android platform and mainly considered static solutions rather than dynamic ones. Compelled by this fact, in this paper, we contribute a fully-fledged tool able to dynamically analyze any iOS software in terms of method invocation (i.e., which API methods the application invokes and under what order), and produce exploitable results that can be used to manually or automatically trace software’s behavior to decide if it contains malicious code or not. By employing real life malware we assessed our tool both manually, as well as, via heuristic techniques and the results we obtained seem highly accurate in detecting malicious code.     

Android恶意软件特征研究

智能手机的广泛应用导致手机恶意软件的数量急速增加,尤其是近几年,基于Android操作系统的手机在智能手机市场占据主导地位,针对Android系统的恶意软件数量快速增加。手机恶意软件主要收集手机用户地理位置、语音通信、短信等个人隐私信息,或进行恶意扣费、耗费系统资源等行为,给用户自身和手机系统带来很大危害。准确分析恶意软件行为特征可以为后续清除恶意软件提供有力依据。传统的恶意软件分析技术主要包括静态分析与动态分析,文中介绍了当前存在的一些手机恶意软件分析检测技术及其缺陷,并从安装、激活、恶意负载三方面对已知Android恶意软件主要行为特征进行详细分析。     

A graph mining approach for detecting unknown malwares

Nowadays malware is one of the serious problems in the modern societies. Although the signature based malicious code detection is the standard technique in all commercial antivirus softwares, it can only achieve detection once the virus has already caused damage and it is registered. Therefore, it fails to detect new malwares (unknown malwares). Since most of malwares have similar behavior, a behavior based method can detect unknown malwares. The behavior of a program can be represented by a set of called API's (application programming interface). Therefore, a classifier can be employed to construct a learning model with a set of programs' API calls. Finally, an intelligent malware detection system is developed to detect unknown malwares automatically. On the other hand, we have an appealing representation model to visualize the executable files structure which is control flow graph (CFG). This model represents another semantic aspect of programs. This paper presents a robust semantic based method to detect unknown malwares based on combination of a visualize model (CFG) and called API's. The main contribution of this paper is extracting CFG from programs and combining it with extracted API calls to have more information about executable files. This new representation model is called API-CFG. In addition, to have fast learning and classification process, the control flow graphs are converted to a set of feature vectors by a nice trick. Our approach is capable of classifying unseen benign and malicious code with high accuracy. The results show a statistically significant improvement over n-grams based detection method.     

恶意代码行为获取的研究与实现

分析对比了恶意代码的静态分析方法和动态分析方法,设计并实现了一种结合虚拟机技术和Windows操作系统自身所具有的调试功能来获取恶意代码行为的模块,该模块能够自动控制虚拟机运行监控程序来获取恶意代码的行为,并通过引入基于信息增益的特征权重算法来获得行为特征.