Probabilistic analysis of dynamic malware traces

Abstract

We propose a method to automatically group unknown binaries executed in sandbox according to their interaction with system resources (files on the filesystem, mutexes, registry keys, network communication with remote servers and error messages generated by operating system) such that each group corresponds to a malware family. The method utilizes probabilistic generative model (Bernoulli mixture model), which allows human-friendly prioritization of identified clusters and extraction of readable behavioral indicators to maximize interpretability. We compare it to relevant prior art on a large set of malware binaries where a quality of cluster prioritization and automatic extraction of indicators of compromise is demonstrated. The proposed approach therefore implements complete pipeline which has the potential to significantly speed-up analysis of unknown samples.