Title
MalFlow: identification of C&C servers through host-based data flow profiling.
Abstract
Modern malware interacts with multiple internet domains for various reasons: communication with command and control (C&C) servers, boosting click counts on online ads or performing denial of service attacks, among others. The identification of malign domains is thus necessary to prevent (and react to) incidents. Since malware creators constantly generate new domains to avoid detection, maintaining up-to-date lists of malign domains is challenging. We propose an approach that automatically estimates the risk associated with communicating with a domain based on the data flow behavior of a process communicating with it. Our approach uses unsupervised learning on data flow profiles that capture communication of processes with network endpoints at system call level to distinguish between likely malign or benign behavior. Our evaluations on a large and diverse data set indicate a high detection accuracy and a reasonable performance overhead. We further discuss how this concept can be used in an operational setting for fine-grained enforcement of risk-based incident response actions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2851613.2851802
SAC 2016: Symposium on Applied Computing Pisa Italy April, 2016
Field
DocType
ISBN
Denial-of-service attack,Profiling (computer programming),Computer security,Computer science,Server,Computer network,System call,Unsupervised learning,Malware,Data flow diagram,The Internet
Conference
978-1-4503-3739-7
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
17
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tobias Wüchner1464.17
Martín Ochoa220122.62
Mojdeh Golagha392.16
Gaurav Srivastava434349.08
Thomas Schreck500.34
Alexander Pretschner61585137.50