Biblio

Ransomware has become a very significant cyber threat. The basic idea of ransomware was presented in the form of a cryptovirus in 1995. However, it was considered as merely a conceptual topic since then for over a decade. In 2017, ransomware has become a reality, with several famous cases of ransomware having compromised important computer systems worldwide. For example, the damage caused by CryptoLocker and WannaCry is huge, as well as global. They encrypt victims' files and require user's payment to decrypt them. Because they utilize public key cryptography, the key for recovery cannot be found in the footprint of the ransomware on the victim's system. Therefore, once infected, the system cannot be recovered without paying for restoration. Various methods to deal this threat have been developed by antivirus researchers and experts in network security. However, it is believed that cryptographic defense is infeasible because recovering a victim's files is computationally as difficult as breaking a public key cryptosystem. Quite recently, various approaches to protect the crypto-API of an OS from malicious codes have been proposed. Most ransomware generate encryption keys using the random number generation service provided by the victim's OS. Thus, if a user can control all random numbers generated by the system, then he/she can recover the random numbers used by the ransomware for the encryption key. In this paper, we propose a dynamic ransomware protection method that replaces the random number generator of the OS with a user-defined generator. As the proposed method causes the virus program to generate keys based on the output from the user-defined generator, it is possible to recover an infected file system by reproducing the keys the attacker used to perform the encryption.