Paper Info
Title
Http-Based Apt Malware Infection Detection Using Url Correlation Analysis
Abstract
APT malware exploits HTTP to establish communication with a C & C server to hide their malicious activities. Thus, HTTP-based APT malware infection can be discovered by analyzing HTTP traffic. Recent methods have been dependent on the extraction of statistical features from HTTP traffic, which is suitable for machine learning. However, the features they extract from the limited HTTP-based APT malware traffic dataset are too simple to detect APT malware with strong randomness insufficiently. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach which could uncover APT malware traffic related to data exfiltration and other suspect APT activities by analyzing the header fields of HTTP traffic. We use the Referer field in the HTTP header to construct a web request graph. Then, we optimize the web request graph by combining URL similarity and redirect reconstruction. We also use a normal uncorrelated request filter to filter the remaining unrelated legitimate requests. We have evaluated the proposed method using 1.48 GB normal HTTP flow from clickminer and 280 MB APT malware HTTP flow from Stratosphere Lab, Contagiodump, and pcapanalysis. The experimental results have shown that the URL-correlation-based APT malware traffic detection method can correctly detect 96.08% APT malware traffic, and its recall rate is 98.87%. We have also conducted experiments to compare our approach against Jiang's method, MalHunter, and BotDet, and the experimental results have confirmed that our detection approach has a better performance, the accuracy of which reached 96.08% and the F1 value increased by more than 5%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1155/2021/6653386
SECURITY AND COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Journal
2021
1939-0114
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wei-na Niu183.26
Jiao Xie200.34
Xiaosong Zhang39114.00
Chong Wang400.34
Xin-Qiang Li500.34
Ruidong Chen621.09
Xiaolei Liu7118.70