ESCAPE: entropy score analysis of packed executable

Malware developers hide the malicious payload of malware binary by employing various obfuscation techniques. One such technique commonly applied is packing. Packer transforms the original bytes so it is difficult to recognize the behaviour of any executable. Although the contents of a file is changed, some byte patterns may be preserved across different packed executables. Malware detectors need to apply unpacking mechanism prior to any detection or analysis to every sample under consideration. In this paper, we have proposed a method that discriminate packed binaries from the native files to minimize the processing time of AV scanners. We have used the blockwise entropy score of byte features of the executable. Experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of identifying packed and native executable which are packed using different malware packers.