Metamorphic worm that carries its own morphing engine

Metamorphic malware changes its internal structure across generations, but its functionality remains unchanged. Well-designed metamorphic malware will evade signature detection. Recent research has revealed techniques based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) for detecting many types of metamorphic malware, as well as techniques for evading such detection. A worm is a type of malware that actively spreads across a network to other host systems. In this project we design and implement a prototype metamorphic worm that carries its own morphing engine. This is challenging, since the morphing engine itself must be morphed across replications, which imposes restrictions on the structure of the worm. Our design employs previously developed techniques to evade detection. We provide test results to confirm that this worm effectively evades signature and HMM-based detection, and we consider possible detection strategies. This worm provides a concrete example that should prove useful for additional metamorphic detection research.     

Simple substitution distance and metamorphic detection

To evade signature-based detection, metamorphic viruses transform their code before each new infection. Software similarity measures are a potentially useful means of detecting such malware. We can compare a given file to a known sample of metamorphic malware and compute their similarity—if they are sufficiently similar, we classify the file as malware of the same family. In this paper, we analyze an opcode-based software similarity measure inspired by simple substitution cipher cryptanalysis. We show that the technique provides a useful means of classifying metamorphic malware.     

Chi-squared distance and metamorphic virus detection

Metamorphic malware changes its internal structure with each generation, while maintaining its original behavior. Current commercial antivirus software generally scan for known malware signatures; therefore, they are not able to detect metamorphic malware that sufficiently morphs its internal structure. Machine learning methods such as hidden Markov models (HMM) have shown promise for detecting hacker-produced metamorphic malware. However, previous research has shown that it is possible to evade HMM-based detection by carefully morphing with content from benign files. In this paper, we combine HMM detection with a statistical technique based on the chi-squared test to build an improved detection method. We discuss our technique in detail and provide experimental evidence to support our claim of improved detection.     

Shadow attacks: automatically evading system-call-behavior based malware detection

Contemporary malware makes extensive use of different techniques such as packing, code obfuscation, polymorphism, and metamorphism, to evade signature-based detection. Traditional signature-based detection technique is hard to catch up with latest malware or unknown malware. Behavior-based detection models are being investigated as a new methodology to defeat malware. This kind of approaches typically relies on system call sequences/graphs to model a malicious specification/pattern. In this paper, we present a new class of attacks, namely ??shadow attacks??, to evade current behavior-based malware detectors by partitioning one piece of malware into multiple ??shadow processes??. None of the shadow processes contains a recognizable malicious behavior specification known to single-process-based malware detectors, yet those shadow processes as an ensemble can still fulfill the original malicious functionality. To demonstrate the feasibility of this attack, we have developed a compiler-level prototype tool, AutoShadow, to automatically generate shadow-process version of malware given the source code of original malware. Our preliminary result has demonstrated the effectiveness of shadow attacks in evading several behavior-based malware analysis/detection solutions in real world. With the increasing adoption of multi-core computers and multi-process programs, malware writers may exploit more such shadow attacks in the future. We hope our preliminary study can foster more discussion and research to improve current generation of behavior-based malware detectors to address this great potential threat before it becomes a security problem of the epidemic proportions.     

Code obfuscation techniques for metamorphic viruses

This paper deals with metamorphic viruses. More precisely, it examines the use of advanced code obfuscation techniques with respect to metamorphic viruses. Our objective is to evaluate the difficulty of a reliable static detection of viruses that use such obfuscation techniques. Here we extend Spinellis’ result (IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 49(1), 280–284, 2003) on the detection complexity of bounded-length polymorphic viruses to metamorphic viruses. In particular, we prove that reliable static detection of a particular category of metamorphic viruses is an -complete problem. Then we empirically illustrate our result by constructing a practical obfuscator which could be used by metamorphic viruses in the future to evade detection.     

恶意代码的变形技术研究

恶意代码常常使用一些隐形技术来躲避反病毒软件的检测。然而,采用加密和多态技术的恶意代码已经难以躲避基于特征码和代码仿真技术的检测,而变形技术却呈现出较强的反检测能力。通过对变形技术作深入的分析,详细介绍了变形引擎及其所采用的代码混淆技术,以及当前的变形恶意代码检测技术,并简要分析了变形技术在软件防护领域的应用。     

Static analysis for the detection of metamorphic computer viruses using repeated-instructions counting heuristics

Metamorphic viruses are particularly insidious as they change their form at each infection, thus making detection hard. Many techniques have been proposed to produce metamorphic malware, and many approaches have been explored to detect it. This paper introduces a detection technique that relies on the assumption that a side effect of the most common metamorphic engines is the dissemination of a high number of repeated instructions in the body of the virus program. We have evaluated our technique on a population of 1,000 programs and the experimentation outcomes indicate that it is accurate in classifying metamorphic viruses and viruses of other nature, too. Virus writers use to introduce code from benign files in order to evade antivirus; our technique is able to recognize virus even if benign code is added to it.     

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.     

基于集成神经网络的计算机病毒检测方法

在借鉴传统的特征扫描技术的基础上,提出了一种基于n-gram分析的计算机病毒自动检测方法。本文将基于信息增益的特征选择技术引入集成神经网络的构建中,结合Bagging算法,同时扰动训练数据和输入属性生成精确且差异度大的个体分类器,在此基础上以集成的 BP神经网络为模式分类器实现对病毒的检测。该法并不针对某一特定病毒,是一种通用的病毒检测器。实验表明提出的检测方法具有较强的泛化能力和较高的精确率。     

Metamorphic malware identification using engine-specific patterns based on co-opcode graphs

A metamorphic virus is a type of malware that modifies its code using a morphing engine. Morphing engines are used to generate a large number of metamorphic malware variants by performing different obfuscation techniques. Since each metamorphic malware has its own unique structure, signature based anti-virus programs are ineffective to detect these metamorphic variants. Therefore, detection of these kind of viruses becomes an increasingly important task. Recently, many researchers have focused on extracting common patterns of metamorphic variants that can be used as micro-signatures to identify the metamorphic malware executables. With the similar motivation, in this work, we propose a novel metamorphic malware identification method, named HLES-MMI (Higher-level Engine Signature based Metamorphic Malware Identification). The proposed method firstly constructs a unique graph structure, called as co-opcode graph, for each metamorphic family, then extracts engine-specific opcode patterns from the graphs. Finally, it generates higher-level signature belonging to each family by representing the extracted opcode-patterns with a binary vector. Experimental results on four datasets produced by different morphing engines demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method by comparing with several existing malware identification methods.     

The future of software infrastructure protection

In this paper the author describes how a Gatekeeper prototype had detected 83 percent of all unknown real viruses thrown at it. Even more intriguing was that the 17 percent of viruses missed were all due to the prototype code's immaturity, rather than any failing of the method used to detect them. Stated another way: An enterprise-ready version of the prototype would have captured every virus the Internet could have thrown at it during its testing period. Of course, many signature-based virus detection tools can detect 100 percent of known viruses. But very few of them can recognize new viruses.     

Detection of metamorphic and virtualization-based malware using algebraic specification

We present an overview of the latest developments in the detection of metamorphic and virtualization-based malware using an algebraic specification of the Intel 64 assembly programming language. After giving an overview of related work, we describe the development of a specification of a subset of the Intel 64 instruction set in Maude, an advanced formal algebraic specification tool. We develop the technique of metamorphic malware detection based on equivalence-in-context so that it is applicable to imperative programming languages in general, and we give two detailed examples of how this might be used in a practical setting to detect metamorphic malware. We discuss the application of these techniques within anti-virus software, and give a proof-of-concept system for defeating detection counter-measures used by virtualization-based malware, which is based on our Maude specification of Intel 64. Finally, we compare formal and informal approaches to malware detection, and give some directions for future research.     

计算机病毒与反病毒检测系统技术分析

针对计算机被病毒感染和破坏造成严重损失,在分析了计算机病毒的特征和反病毒检测系统技术的基础上,提出了一种高效的病毒特征检测机制.首先,例举先进的反病毒技术有实时扫描技术,启发式代码扫描技术,虚拟机技术和主动内核技术等;然后,分析了二进制可执行病毒脚本病毒和宏病毒的特征提取技术,设计出一个简单蜜罐系统来获取病毒样本;其次,为了解决特征代码不能检测未知病毒的问题,对引擎做了改进,提出了一种融合AC自动机匹配算法和BM算法的ACBM多模式匹配算法.算法在匹配病毒特征时,具有效率高,速度快和准确度高的特点,以特征代码法为基础杀毒软件是病毒检测系统是下一步研究目标.     

A Pareto-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for automatic rule generation in network intrusion detection systems

Attacks against computer systems are becoming more complex, making it necessary to continually improve the security systems, such as intrusion detection systems which provide security for computer systems by distinguishing between hostile and non-hostile activity. Intrusion detection systems are usually classified into two main categories according to whether they are based on misuse (signature-based) detection or on anomaly detection. With the aim of minimizing the number of wrong decisions, a new Pareto-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is used to optimize the automatic rule generation of a signature-based intrusion detection system (IDS). This optimizer, included within a network IDS, has been evaluated using a benchmark dataset and real traffic of a Spanish university. The results obtained in this real application show the advantages of using this multi-objective approach.     

基于异常和特征的入侵检测系统模型

目前大多数入侵检测系统(Intrusion Detection System，IDS)没有兼备检测已知和未知入侵的能力，甚至不能检测已知入侵的微小变异，效率较低。本文提出了一种结合异常和特征检测技术的IDS。使用单一技术的IDS存在严重的缺点，为提高其效率，唯一的解决方案是两者的结合，即基于异常和特征的入侵检测。异常检测能发现未知入侵，而基于特征的检测能发现已知入侵，结合两者而成的基于异常和特征的入侵检测系统不但能检测已知和未知的入侵，而且能更新基于特征检测的数据库，因而具有很高的效率。     

Metamorphic Malware Detection Using Code Metrics

ABSTRACT

Malware is becoming more and more aggressive and new techniques are emerging to allow malicious code to evade detection by antiviruses. Metamorphic malware is a particularly insidious kind of virus that changes its form at each infection. In this article, a technique for detecting metamorphic viruses is proposed that is based on identifying specific features of the assembly code, such as the instructions that change the contents of the registers, the instructions that change the control flow, and the potential code fragmentation. Such features have been derived by the analysis of a large dataset of malware. The experimentation suggests that the proposed technique produces very high precision (over 97%) in recognizing metamorphic malware, and allows also for distinguishing among different families of malware.     

Masquerade detection using profile hidden Markov models

In this paper, we consider the problem of masquerade detection, based on user-issued UNIX commands. We present a novel detection technique based on profile hidden Markov models (PHMMs). For comparison purposes, we implement an existing modeling technique based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). We compare these approaches and show that, in general, our PHMM technique is competitive with HMMs. However, the standard test data set lacks positional information. We conjecture that such positional information would give our PHMM a significant advantage over HMM-based detection. To lend credence to this conjecture, we generate a simulated data set that includes positional information. Based on this simulated data, experimental results show that our PHMM-based approach outperforms other techniques when limited training data is available.     

隐秘攻击与入侵检测的体系结构

入侵检测系统（IDS）是目前研究的一个热点，IDS从攻吉者的角度来看待系统安全，已经成为安全体系结构中不可缺少的一个环节，但是目前的IDS检测技术还不够成熟，存在一些方法使得攻击者可能绕开IDS的检测，文章探讨了一种所谓的隐秘攻击技术，这种方法用以攻击传统的基于关键字匹配的IDS，然后从如何检测隐秘攻击的角度出发讨论了IDS的安全体系结构。     

Eigenvalue analysis for metamorphic detection

Metamorphic malware changes its internal structure on each infection while maintaining its function. Although many detection techniques have been proposed, practical and effective metamorphic detection remains a difficult challenge. In this paper, we analyze a previously proposed eigenvector-based method for metamorphic detection. The approach considered here was inspired by a well-known facial recognition technique. We compute eigenvectors using raw byte data extracted from executables belonging to a metamorphic family. These eigenvectors are then used to compute a score for a collection of executable files that includes family viruses and representative examples of benign code. We perform extensive testing to determine the effectiveness of this classification method. Among other results, we show that this eigenvalue-based approach is effective when applied to a family of highly metamorphic code that successfully evades statistical-based detection. We also experiment computing eigenvectors on extracted opcode sequences, as opposed to raw byte sequences. Our experimental evidence indicates that the use of opcode sequences does not improve the results.