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Register a new userNeurlux: Dynamic Malware Analysis Without Feature Engineering
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Added by
Christopher Salls
Publication date
2019
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Malware detection plays a vital role in computer security. Modern machine learning approaches have been centered around domain knowledge for extracting malicious features. However, many potential features can be used, and it is time consuming and difficult to manually identify the best features, especially given the diverse nature of malware. In this paper, we propose Neurlux, a neural network for malware detection. Neurlux does not rely on any feature engineering, rather it learns automatically from dynamic analysis reports that detail behavioral information. Our model borrows ideas from the field of document classification, using word sequences present in the reports to predict if a report is from a malicious binary or not. We investigate the learned features of our model and show which components of the reports it tends to give the highest importance. Then, we evaluate our approach on two different datasets and report formats, showing that Neurlux improves on the state of the art and can effectively learn from the dynamic analysis reports. Furthermore, we show that our approach is portable to other malware analysis environments and generalizes to different datasets.
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Dynamic malware analysis executes the program in an isolated environment and monitors its run-time behaviour (e.g. system API calls) for malware detection. This technique has been proven to be effective against various code obfuscation techniques and newly released (zero-day) malware. However, existing works typically only consider the API name while ignoring the arguments, or require complex feature engineering operations and expert knowledge to process the arguments. In this paper, we propose a novel and low-cost feature extraction approach, and an effective deep neural network architecture for accurate and fast malware detection. Specifically, the feature representation approach utilizes a feature hashing trick to encode the API call arguments associated with the API name. The deep neural network architecture applies multiple Gated-CNNs (convolutional neural networks) to transform the extracted features of each API call. The outputs are further processed through bidirectional LSTM (long-short term memory networks) to learn the sequential correlation among API calls. Experiments show that our solution outperforms baselines significantly on a large real dataset. Valuable insights about feature engineering and architecture design are derived from the ablation study.
Deep learning has been used in the research of malware analysis. Most classification methods use either static analysis features or dynamic analysis features for malware family classification, and rarely combine them as classification features and also no extra effort is spent integrating the two types of features. In this paper, we combine static and dynamic analysis features with deep neural networks for Windows malware classification. We develop several methods to generate static and dynamic analysis features to classify malware in different ways. Given these features, we conduct experiments with composite neural network, showing that the proposed approach performs best with an accuracy of 83.17% on a total of 80 malware families with 4519 malware samples. Additionally, we show that using integrated features for malware family classification outperforms using static features or dynamic features alone. We show how static and dynamic features complement each other for malware classification.
Numerous metamorphic and polymorphic malicious variants are generated automatically on a daily basis by mutation engines that transform the code of a malicious program while retaining its functionality, in order to evade signature-based detection. These automatic processes have greatly increased the number of malware variants, deeming their fully-manual analysis impossible. Malware classification is the task of determining to which family a new malicious variant belongs. Variants of the same malware family show similar behavioral patterns. Thus, classifying newly discovered malicious programs and applications helps assess the risks they pose. Moreover, malware classification facilitates determining which of the newly discovered variants should undergo manual analysis by a security expert, in order to determine whether they belong to a new family (e.g., one whose members exploit a zero-day vulnerability) or are simply the result of a concept drift within a known malicious family. This motivated intense research in recent years on devising high-accuracy automatic tools for malware classification. In this work, we present DAEMON - a novel dataset-agnostic malware classifier. A key property of DAEMON is that the type of features it uses and the manner in which they are mined facilitate understanding the distinctive behavior of malware families, making its classification decisions explainable. Weve optimized DAEMON using a large-scale dataset of x86 binaries, belonging to a mix of several malware families targeting computers running Windows. We then re-trained it and applied it, without any algorithmic change, feature re-engineering or parameter tuning, to two other large-scale datasets of malicious Android applications consisting of numerous malware families. DAEMON obtained highly accurate classification results on all datasets, establishing that it is also platform-agnostic.
Android malware has been on the rise in recent years due to the increasing popularity of Android and the proliferation of third party application markets. Emerging Android malware families are increasingly adopting sophisticated detection avoidance techniques and this calls for more effective approaches for Android malware detection. Hence, in this paper we present and evaluate an n-gram opcode features based approach that utilizes machine learning to identify and categorize Android malware. This approach enables automated feature discovery without relying on prior expert or domain knowledge for pre-determined features. Furthermore, by using a data segmentation technique for feature selection, our analysis is able to scale up to 10-gram opcodes. Our experiments on a dataset of 2520 samples showed an f-measure of 98% using the n-gram opcode based approach. We also provide empirical findings that illustrate factors that have probable impact on the overall n-gram opcodes performance trends.
Due to its open-source nature, Android operating system has been the main target of attackers to exploit. Malware creators always perform different code obfuscations on their apps to hide malicious activities. Features extracted from these obfuscated samples through program analysis contain many useless and disguised features, which leads to many false negatives. To address the issue, in this paper, we demonstrate that obfuscation-resilient malware analysis can be achieved through contrastive learning. We take the Android malware classification as an example to demonstrate our analysis. The key insight behind our analysis is that contrastive learning can be used to reduce the difference introduced by obfuscation while amplifying the difference between malware and benign apps (or other types of malware). Based on the proposed analysis, we design a system that can achieve robust and interpretable classification of Android malware. To achieve robust classification, we perform contrastive learning on malware samples to learn an encoder that can automatically extract robust features from malware samples. To achieve interpretable classification, we transform the function call graph of a sample into an image by centrality analysis. Then the corresponding heatmaps are obtained by visualization techniques. These heatmaps can help users understand why the malware is classified as this family. We implement IFDroid and perform extensive evaluations on two widely used datasets. Experimental results show that IFDroid is superior to state-of-the-art Android malware familial classification systems. Moreover, IFDroid is capable of maintaining 98.2% true positive rate on classifying 8,112 obfuscated malware samples.
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