Malware Detection Using Logic Signature of Basic Block Sequence

Abstract

Malware detection is an important method for maintaining the security and privacy in cyberspace. As the most mainstream method currently, signature-based detecting is confronted with many obfuscation methods which can hide the true signature of malware. In our research, we propose a logic signature-based malware detecting method to overcome the shortcoming of being susceptible to disturbance in data signature-based method. Firstly, we achieve the logic of basic block based on Symbolic execution and Static Single Assignment, and then use a set of expression trees to represent the basic block logic, the trees set will be filtered to pick out the remarkable items. Depending on basic block logic trees set, we use n-gram method to select features for the discrimination of malicious and benign software. Every feature of program is a sequence of basic block logic and the feature matching is based on edit distance calculating. We design and implement a detector and evaluate its effectiveness by comparing with data signature-based detector. The experimental results indicate that the proposed malware detector using logic signature of basic block sequence has a higher performance than data signature-based detectors.