Visible to the public Biblio

Filters: Author is Shafiq, Z.  [Clear All Filters]
2018-06-20
Shafiq, Z., Liu, A..  2017.  A graph theoretic approach to fast and accurate malware detection. 2017 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking) and Workshops. :1–9.

Due to the unavailability of signatures for previously unknown malware, non-signature malware detection schemes typically rely on analyzing program behavior. Prior behavior based non-signature malware detection schemes are either easily evadable by obfuscation or are very inefficient in terms of storage space and detection time. In this paper, we propose GZero, a graph theoretic approach fast and accurate non-signature malware detection at end hosts. GZero it is effective while being efficient in terms of both storage space and detection time. We conducted experiments on a large set of both benign software and malware. Our results show that GZero achieves more than 99% detection rate and a false positive rate of less than 1%, with less than 1 second of average scan time per program and is relatively robust to obfuscation attacks. Due to its low overheads, GZero can complement existing malware detection solutions at end hosts.

2018-03-19
Shahid, U., Farooqi, S., Ahmad, R., Shafiq, Z., Srinivasan, P., Zaffar, F..  2017.  Accurate Detection of Automatically Spun Content via Stylometric Analysis. 2017 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM). :425–434.

Spammers use automated content spinning techniques to evade plagiarism detection by search engines. Text spinners help spammers in evading plagiarism detectors by automatically restructuring sentences and replacing words or phrases with their synonyms. Prior work on spun content detection relies on the knowledge about the dictionary used by the text spinning software. In this work, we propose an approach to detect spun content and its seed without needing the text spinner's dictionary. Our key idea is that text spinners introduce stylometric artifacts that can be leveraged for detecting spun documents. We implement and evaluate our proposed approach on a corpus of spun documents that are generated using a popular text spinning software. The results show that our approach can not only accurately detect whether a document is spun but also identify its source (or seed) document - all without needing the dictionary used by the text spinner.