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A Graph-based Model for Malicious Software Detection Exploiting Domination Relations between System-call Groups

Published: 13 September 2018 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a graph-based algorithmic technique for malware detection, utilizing the System-call Dependency Graphs (ScDG) obtained through taint analysis traces. We leverage the grouping of system-calls into system-call groups with respect to their functionality to merge disjoint vertices of ScDG graphs, transforming them to Group Relation Graphs (GrG); note that, the GrG graphs represent malware's behavior being hence more resilient to probable mutations of its structure. More precisely, we extend the use of GrG graphs by mapping their vertices on the plane utilizing the degrees and the vertex-weights of a specific underlying graph of the GrG graph as to compute domination relations. Furthermore, we investigate how the activity of each system-call group could be utilized in order to distinguish graph-representations of malware and benign software. The domination relations among the vertices of GrG graphs result to a new graph representation that we call Coverage Graph of the GrG graph. Finally, we evaluate the potentials of our detection model using graph similarity between Coverage Graphs of known malicious and benign software samples of various types.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Detection and classification of malicious software utilizing Max-Flows between system-call groupsJournal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques10.1007/s11416-022-00433-219:1(97-123)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Behavior-based detection and classification of malicious software utilizing structural characteristics of group sequence graphsJournal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques10.1007/s11416-022-00423-418:4(383-406)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2022
  • (2022)A hierarchical layer of atomic behavior for malicious behaviors predictionJournal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques10.1007/s11416-022-00422-518:4(367-382)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2022
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cover image ACM Other conferences
CompSysTech '18: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies
September 2018
206 pages
ISBN:9781450364256
DOI:10.1145/3274005
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

In-Cooperation

  • ERSVB: EURORISC SYSTEMS - Varna, Bulgaria
  • FOSEUB: FEDERATION OF THE SCIENTIFIC ENGINEERING UNIONS - Bulgaria
  • UORB: University of Ruse, Bulgaria
  • TECHUVB: Technical University of Varna, Bulgaria

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 September 2018

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Author Tags

  1. Algorithms
  2. Detection
  3. Graphs
  4. Malware
  5. Security
  6. Systems

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  • Refereed limited

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CompSysTech'18

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Overall Acceptance Rate 241 of 492 submissions, 49%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Detection and classification of malicious software utilizing Max-Flows between system-call groupsJournal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques10.1007/s11416-022-00433-219:1(97-123)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Behavior-based detection and classification of malicious software utilizing structural characteristics of group sequence graphsJournal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques10.1007/s11416-022-00423-418:4(383-406)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2022
  • (2022)A hierarchical layer of atomic behavior for malicious behaviors predictionJournal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques10.1007/s11416-022-00422-518:4(367-382)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2022
  • (2021)A graph-based framework for malicious software detection and classification utilizing temporal-graphsJournal of Computer Security10.3233/JCS-210057(1-38)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2021
  • (2021)Detection and Classification of Malicious Software based on Regional Matching of Temporal GraphsProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies10.1145/3472410.3472417(28-33)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2021
  • (2021)A ranking based multi-view learning method for positive and unlabeled graph classificationIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2021.3119626(1-1)Online publication date: 2021
  • (2021)2-SPIFF: a 2-stage packer identification method based on function call graph and file attributesApplied Intelligence10.1007/s10489-021-02347-w51:12(9038-9053)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2021
  • (2020)Searching for Malware Dataset: a Systematic Literature Review2020 International Conference on Information Technology Systems and Innovation (ICITSI)10.1109/ICITSI50517.2020.9264929(375-380)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2020

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