survey

Identifying Authorship in Malicious Binaries: Features, Challenges & Datasets

Authors:

Daniele Sgandurra,

Lorenzo Cavallaro,

Jorge Blasco AlisAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Computing Surveys, Volume 56, Issue 8

Article No.: 212, Pages 1 - 36

https://doi.org/10.1145/3653973

Published: 30 April 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Attributing a piece of malware to its creator typically requires threat intelligence. Binary attribution increases the level of difficulty as it mostly relies upon the ability to disassemble binaries to obtain authorship-related features. We perform a systematic analysis of works in the area of malware authorship attribution. We identify key findings and some shortcomings of current approaches and explore the open research challenges. To mitigate the lack of ground-truth datasets in this domain, we publish alongside this survey the largest and most diverse meta-information dataset of 17,513 malware labeled to 275 threat actor groups.

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H. Xue, S. Sun, G. Venkataramani, and T. Lan. 2019. Machine learning-based analysis of program binaries: A comprehensive study. IEEE Access 7 (2019), 65889–65912.

Cited By

Saha ABlasco JCavallaro LLindorfer M(2024)ADAPT it! Automating APT Campaign and Group Attribution by Leveraging and Linking Heterogeneous FilesProceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses10.1145/3678890.3678909(114-129)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3678890.3678909
Rani NSaha BKumar RShukla S(2024)Genesis of Cyber Threats: Towards Malware-based Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Attribution2024 IEEE 6th International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems, and Applications (TPS-ISA)10.1109/TPS-ISA62245.2024.00052(399-408)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TPS-ISA62245.2024.00052
Wang ZZhou YLiu HQiu JFang BTian Z(2024)ThreatInsight: Innovating Early Threat Detection Through Threat-Intelligence-Driven Analysis and AttributionIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2024.347479236:12(9388-9402)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TKDE.2024.3474792

Index Terms

Identifying Authorship in Malicious Binaries: Features, Challenges & Datasets

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Published In

cover image ACM Computing Surveys

ACM Computing Surveys Volume 56, Issue 8

August 2024

963 pages

EISSN:1557-7341

DOI:10.1145/3613627

Editors:
David Atienza
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
,
Michela Milano
University of Bologna, Italy

Issue’s Table of Contents

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 the author(s) 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].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 April 2024

Online AM: 26 March 2024

Accepted: 07 March 2024

Revised: 23 February 2024

Received: 18 November 2020

Published in CSUR Volume 56, Issue 8

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Cited By

Saha ABlasco JCavallaro LLindorfer M(2024)ADAPT it! Automating APT Campaign and Group Attribution by Leveraging and Linking Heterogeneous FilesProceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses10.1145/3678890.3678909(114-129)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3678890.3678909
Rani NSaha BKumar RShukla S(2024)Genesis of Cyber Threats: Towards Malware-based Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Attribution2024 IEEE 6th International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems, and Applications (TPS-ISA)10.1109/TPS-ISA62245.2024.00052(399-408)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TPS-ISA62245.2024.00052
Wang ZZhou YLiu HQiu JFang BTian Z(2024)ThreatInsight: Innovating Early Threat Detection Through Threat-Intelligence-Driven Analysis and AttributionIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2024.347479236:12(9388-9402)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TKDE.2024.3474792

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