Title
Catching The Behavioral Differences Between Multiple Executions For Malware Detection
Abstract
As the number of new malware has increased explosively, traditional malware detection approaches based on pattern matching have been less effective. Therefore, it is important to develop a detection method which relies on not signatures but characteristic behaviors of malware. Recently, malware authors have been embedding functions for countermeasure against malware analyses and detections into malware. Accordingly, modern malware often changes their runtime behaviors in each execution to tolerate against malware analyses and detections. For example, when malware copies itself on a file system, it can randomly determine its file name for avoiding the detections. Another example is that when malware tries to connect its command and control server, it randomly chooses a domain name from a hard-coded domain name list to avoid being blocked by a static blacklist of malicious domain names. We assume that such evasive behaviors are unnecessary for benign software. Therefore the behaviors can be the clues to distinguish malware from benign software. In this paper, we propose a novel behavior-based malware detection method which focuses attention on such characteristics. Our proposed method conducts dynamic analysis on an executable file multiple times in same sandbox environment so as to obtain plural lists of API call sequences and plural traffic logs, and then compares the lists and the logs to find the difference between the multiple executions. In. the experiments with 5,697 malware samples and 819 benign software samples, we can detect about 70% malware samples and the false positive rate is about 1%. In addition, we can detect about 50% malware samples which were not detected by each Anti-Virus Software engine. Therefore we confirm the possibility the proposed method may be able to improve the accuracy of malware detection utilizing in combination with other existing methods.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1587/transfun.E96.A.225
IEICE TRANSACTIONS ON FUNDAMENTALS OF ELECTRONICS COMMUNICATIONS AND COMPUTER SCIENCES
Keywords
Field
DocType
malware detection, dynamic analysis, Behavioral Differences
World Wide Web,Computer security,Malware,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
E96A
1
0916-8508
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
7
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Takahiro Kasama1434.88
Katsunari Yoshioka214722.92
Daisuke Inoue3374.74
Tsutomu Matsumoto41156197.58