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Article
Deriving common malware behavior through graph clustering
Computers & Security (2013)
  • Younghee Park, San Jose State University
  • Douglas S. Reeves, North Carolina State University
  • Mark Stamp, San Jose State University
Abstract

Detection of malicious software (malware) continues to be a problem as hackers devise new ways to evade available methods. The proliferation of malware and malware variants requires new advanced methods to detect them. This paper proposes a method to construct a common behavioral graph representing the execution behavior of a family of malware instances. The method generates one common behavioral graph by clustering a set of individual behavioral graphs, which represent kernel objects and their attributes based on system call traces. The resulting common behavioral graph has a common path, called HotPath, which is observed in all the malware instances in the same family. The proposed method shows high detection rates and false positive rates close to 0%. The derived common behavioral graph is highly scalable regardless of new instances added. It is also robust against system call attacks.

Keywords
  • Malware,
  • Dynamic analysis,
  • graph clustering,
  • intrusion detection,
  • Virtualization
Publication Date
2013
Publisher Statement
SJSU users: use the following link to login and access the article via SJSU databases
Citation Information
Younghee Park, Douglas S. Reeves and Mark Stamp. "Deriving common malware behavior through graph clustering" Computers & Security Vol. 39 Iss. B (2013)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/mark_stamp/7/