Title
PE-Miner: Mining Structural Information to Detect Malicious Executables in Realtime
Abstract
In this paper, we present an accurate and realtime PE-Miner framework that automatically extracts distinguishing features from portable executables (PE) to detect zero-day (i.e. previously unknown) malware. The distinguishing features are extracted using the structural information standardized by the Microsoft Windows operating system for executables, DLLs and object files. We follow a threefold research methodology: (1) identify a set of structural features for PE files which is computable in realtime, (2) use an efficient preprocessor for removing redundancy in the features' set, and (3) select an efficient data mining algorithm for final classification between benign and malicious executables. We have evaluated PE-Miner on two malware collections, VX Heavens and Malfease datasets which contain about 11 and 5 thousand malicious PE files respectively. The results of our experiments show that PE-Miner achieves more than 99% detection rate with less than 0.5% false alarm rate for distinguishing between benign and malicious executables. PE-Miner has low processing overheads and takes only 0.244 seconds on the average to scan a given PE file. Finally, we evaluate the robustness and reliability of PE-Miner under several regression tests. Our results show that the extracted features are robust to different packing techniques and PE-Miner is also resilient to majority of crafty evasion strategies.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1007/978-3-642-04342-0_7
RAID
Keywords
Field
DocType
distinguishing feature,portable executables,efficient data mining algorithm,malicious pe,pe file,false alarm rate,detection rate,efficient preprocessor,realtime pe-miner framework,detect malicious executables,mining structural information,malicious executables,operating system,data mining,regression testing
Data mining,Microsoft Windows,Computer science,Computer security,Regression testing,Robustness (computer science),Preprocessor,Redundancy (engineering),Constant false alarm rate,Malware,Executable
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
5758
0302-9743
55
PageRank 
References 
Authors
2.31
7
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
M. Zubair Shafiq154643.41
S. Momina Tabish21196.05
Fauzan Mirza3855.32
Muddassar Farooq4122183.47