JSForce: A Forced Execution Engine for Malicious JavaScript Detection

Abstract

The drastic increase of JavaScript exploitation attacks has led to a strong interest in developing techniques to analyze malicious JavaScript. Existing analysis techniques fall into two general categories: static analysis and dynamic analysis. Static analysis tends to produce inaccurate results (both false positive and false negative) and is vulnerable to a wide series of obfuscation techniques. Thus, dynamic analysis is constantly gaining popularity for exposing the typical features of malicious JavaScript. However, existing dynamic analysis techniques possess limitations such as limited code coverage and incomplete environment setup, leaving a broad attack surface for evading the detection. To overcome these limitations, we present the design and implementation of a novel JavaScript forced execution engine named JSForce which drives an arbitrary JavaScript snippet to execute along different paths without any input or environment setup. We evaluate JSForce using 220,587 HTML and 23,509 PDF real-world samples. Experimental results show that by adopting our forced execution engine, the malicious JavaScript detection rate can be substantially boosted by 206.29% using same detection policy without any noticeable false positive increase.