Biblio

The increasing amount of malware variants seen in the wild is causing problems for Antivirus Software vendors, unable to keep up by creating signatures for each. The methods used to develop a signature, static and dynamic analysis, have various limitations. Machine learning has been used by Antivirus vendors to detect malware based on the information gathered from the analysis process. However, adversarial examples can cause machine learning algorithms to miss-classify new data. In this paper we describe a method for malware analysis by converting malware binaries to images and then preparing those images for training within a Generative Adversarial Network. These unsupervised deep neural networks are not susceptible to adversarial examples. The conversion to images from malware binaries should be faster than using dynamic analysis and it would still be possible to link malware families together. Using the Generative Adversarial Network, malware detection could be much more effective and reliable.

In view of the great threat posed by malware and the rapid growing trend about malware variants, it is necessary to determine the category of new samples accurately for further analysis and taking appropriate countermeasures. The network behavior based classification methods have become more popular now. However, the behavior profiling models they used usually only depict partial network behavior of samples or require specific traffic selection in advance, which may lead to adverse effects on categorizing advanced malware with complex activities. In this paper, to overcome the shortages of traditional models, we raise a comprehensive behavior model for profiling the behavior of malware network activities. And we also propose a corresponding malware classification method which can extract and compare the major behavior of samples. The experimental and comparison results not only demonstrate our method can categorize samples accurately in both criteria, but also prove the advantage of our profiling model to two other approaches in accuracy performance, especially under scenario based criteria.

Malware writers often develop malware with automated measures, so the number of malware has increased dramatically. Automated measures tend to repeatedly use significant modules, which form the basis for identifying malware variants and discriminating malware families. Thus, we propose a novel visualization analysis method for researching malware similarity. This method converts malicious Windows Portable Executable (PE) files into local entropy images for observing internal features of malware, and then normalizes local entropy images into entropy pixel images for malware classification. We take advantage of the Jaccard index to measure similarities between entropy pixel images and the k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) classification algorithm to assign entropy pixel images to different malware families. Preliminary experimental results show that our visualization method can discriminate malware families effectively.

With growing popularity of Android, it's attack surface has also increased. Prevalence of third party android marketplaces gives attackers an opportunity to plant their malicious apps in the mobile eco-system. To evade signature based detection, attackers often transform their malware, for instance, by introducing code level changes. In this paper we propose a lightweight static Permission Flow Graph (PFG) based approach to detect malware even when they have been transformed (obfuscated). A number of techniques based on behavioral analysis have also been proposed in the past; how-ever our interest lies in leveraging the permission framework alone to detect malware variants and transformations without considering behavioral aspects of a malware. Our proposed approach constructs Permission Flow Graph (PFG) for an Android App. Transformations performed at code level, often result in changing control flow, however, most of the time, the permission flow remains invariant. As a consequences, PFGs of transformed malware and non-transformed malware remain structurally similar as shown in this paper using state-of-the-art graph similarity algorithm. Furthermore, we propose graph based similarity metrics at both edge level and vertex level in order to bring forth the structural similarity of the two PFGs being compared. We validate our proposed methodology through machine learning algorithms. Results prove that our approach is successfully able to group together Android malware and its variants (transformations) together in the same cluster. Further, we demonstrate that our proposed approach is able to detect transformed malware with a detection accuracy of 98.26%, thereby ensuring that malicious Apps can be detected even after transformations.