A behavior based malware detection scheme for avoiding false positive

Abstract

The number of malware is increasing rapidly and a lot of malware use stealth techniques such as encryption to evade pattern matching detection by anti-virus software. To resolve the problem, behavior based detection method which focuses on malicious behaviors of malware have been researched. Although they can detect unknown and encrypted malware, they suffer a serious problem of false positives against benign programs. For example, creating files and executing them are common behaviors performed by malware, however, they are also likely performed by benign programs thus it causes false positives. In this paper, we propose a malware detection method based on evaluation of suspicious process behaviors on Windows OS. To avoid false positives, our proposal focuses on not only malware specific behaviors but also normal behavior that malware would usually not do. Moreover, we implement a prototype of our proposal to effectively analyze behaviors of programs. Our evaluation experiments using our malware and benign program datasets show that our malware detection rate is about 60% and it does not cause any false positives. Furthermore, we compare our proposal with completely behavior-based anti-virus software. Our results show that our proposal puts few burdens on users and reduces false positives.