Title
Trusted system-calls analysis methodology aimed at detection of compromised virtual machines using sequential mining.
Abstract
Most organizations today employ cloud-computing environments and virtualization technology; Due to their prevalence and importance in providing services to the entire organization, virtual-servers are constantly targeted by cyber-attacks, and specifically by malware. Existing solutions, consisting of the widely-used antivirus (AV) software, fail to detect newly created and unknown-malware; moreover, by the time the AV is updated, the organization has already been attacked. In this paper, we present a during run-time analysis methodology for a trusted detection of unknown malware on virtual machines (VMs). We conducted trusted analysis of volatile memory dumps taken from a VM and focused on analyzing their system-calls using a sequential-mining-method. We leveraged the most informative system-calls by machine-learning algorithms for the efficient detection of malware in widely used VMs within organizations (i.e. IIS and Email server). We evaluated our methodology in a comprehensive set of experiments over a collections of real-world, advanced, and notorious malware (both ransomware and RAT), and legitimate programs. The results show that our suggested methodology is able to detect the presence of unknown malware, in an average of 97.9% TPR and 0% FPR. Such results and capabilities can form the ground for the development of practical detection-tools for both corporates and companies.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1016/j.knosys.2018.04.033
Knowledge-Based Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Sequential mining,Volatile memory,Memory dump,Virtual machine,Virtual server,Private cloud,Machine learning,Malware detection,Ransomware,Remote access Trojan
Virtualization,Virtual machine,Ransomware,Computer science,Sequential mining,Software,Artificial intelligence,Malware,Machine learning,Operating system,Volatile memory,Trusted system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
153
C
0950-7051
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
5
0.43
25
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nir Nissim119919.42
Yuval Lapidot250.43
Aviad Cohen3587.35
Yuval Elovici42583204.53