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Detection of packed malware

Published: 17 August 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Packing is the most popular obfuscation technique used by malware writers' community in present scenario. The traditional signature-based anti-virus software had played a major role in malware detection, until the dawn of the trend of packed malware. Hence to evade detection of the malwares, a malicious writer relies on packers' softwares; which transforms the binary appearance of the programs without affecting its execution semantics. Therefore the biggest challenge today for malware detection techniques is to figure out whether a given binary is packed or not.
In this paper, we apply pattern recognition technique for detection of packed malware binaries. The objective of our approach is to take out the best set of features from Windows Portable executable files in order to pass it to our classification model. The classification model works in two phases, in the first phase it classifies the packed and non-packed executables. Once an executable is classified as packed, the second phase of classification concludes whether it is packed benign or packed malware executable. We worked with the UPX packer for this approach and have been able to achieve more than 99.9% accuracy in the first phase of classification. We achieved more than 95% accuracy in the second phase of classification as well.

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  • (2022)A Survey on Botnets, Issues, Threats, Methods, Detection and PreventionJournal of Cybersecurity and Privacy10.3390/jcp20100062:1(74-88)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2022
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cover image ACM Conferences
SecurIT '12: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Security of Internet of Things
August 2012
266 pages
ISBN:9781450318228
DOI:10.1145/2490428
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]

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Publication History

Published: 17 August 2012

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Author Tags

  1. non-packed
  2. packed
  3. packer
  4. portable executable

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Defend against Adversarial Attacks in Malware Detection through Attack Space ManagementComputers & Security10.1016/j.cose.2024.103841(103841)Online publication date: Apr-2024
  • (2023)Hide My Payload: An Empirical Study of Antimalware Evasion Tools2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)10.1109/BigData59044.2023.10386838(2989-2998)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2023
  • (2022)A Survey on Botnets, Issues, Threats, Methods, Detection and PreventionJournal of Cybersecurity and Privacy10.3390/jcp20100062:1(74-88)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2022
  • (2021)Malware detection and classification using community detection and social network analysisJournal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques10.1007/s11416-021-00387-xOnline publication date: 14-May-2021
  • (2021)Machine Learning for Static Malware AnalysisEncyclopedia of Machine Learning and Data Science10.1007/978-1-4899-7502-7_981-1(1-4)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2021
  • (2017)Packer Detection for Multi-Layer Executables Using Entropy AnalysisEntropy10.3390/e1903012519:3(125)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2017

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