Collaborative Research: CT-T: Towards Behavior-Based Malware Detection

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Somesh JhaUniversity of Wisconsin, MadisonCollaborative Research: CT T Towards Behavior-Based Malware Detection0627501Panel P060975AbstractMalware is code with malicious intent that can adversely affect thehost on which it executes or the network over which they aretransmitted. A malware detector classifies a program as malware orbenign. Malware writers continuously test the limitations of malwaredetectors in an attempt to discover techniques to evadedetection. This leads to an arms race, where malware writers find newways to create malware that are undetected by commercial malwaredetectors, and where researchers working on malware detection respondby devising new detection techniques. Attackers create new malwareusing two main approaches: program obfuscation and evolution. There isstrong evidence that malware writers are using obfuscation andevolution because the number of new malware families is growing at amuch slower rate than the number of malware instances. For example,according to Symantec threat reports, in the first half of 2005 therewere 10,866 new virus and worm variants but only 170 new families ofmalware. This data also indicates that signature-based techniques formalware detection will not be able to cope with the increase in thenumber of malware instances. Recent results by one of the PIs alsosuggests that current commercial malware detectors are not resilientto obfuscation and evolution techniques used by malware writers. Allthis evidence clearly suggests that we need a new approach to malwaredetection.We propose to explore behavior-based malware detection: our algorithmfocuses on detecting malicious behavior (such as mass-mailing behaviorused by certain worms) rather than searching for syntacticpatterns. We specify malicious behavior in a formal language and thenperform static analysis on the code to determine whether it containsthe specified behavior. Prior work by the investigators demonstratedthat this behavior-based malware detector can detect families ofmalware using a single specification. However, there are challengesthat need to be addressed in the context of behavior-based malwaredetection. We propose tasks to address these challenges. Solutions tothe proposed tasks will lead to malware detection techniques that willresist evasion techniques used by malware writers better than existingmalware detectors. Behavior-based malware detectors can also detectnew malware that are variants of old malware..