A malware detection method based on family behavior graph. Issue 73 (March 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ding, Yuxin; Xia, Xiaoling; Chen, Sheng; Li, Ye
• Is Part Of: Computers & security. Issue 73(2018)
• Page Start: 73
• Page End: 86
• Publication Date: 2018-03
• Subjects: Dependency graph -- Dynamic taint analysis -- Malware -- Security -- System call; Computer security -- Periodicals; Electronic data processing departments -- Security measures -- Periodicals; 005.805
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cose.2017.10.007
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0167-4048

Abstract

Abstract: Graph-based malware detection methods must build a behavior graph for each known malware, and they are difficult to apply in practice. To solve this issue, we study how to build a common behavior graph for each malware family. We represent malware behaviors as dependency graphs. To find the dependency relations between system calls, we use a dynamic taint analysis technique to mark the system call parameters with taint tags, and we then build the system call dependency graph by tracing the propagation of the taint data. Based on the dependency graphs of malware samples, we propose an algorithm to extract the common behavior graph, which is used to represent the behavioral features of a malware family. Finally, a graph matching algorithm that is based on the maximum weight subgraph is used to detect malicious code. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a high detection rate and a low false positive rate and can detect malware variants.