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MALDC: a depth detection method for malware based on behavior chains

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Abstract

Malicious behavior detection is a key topic that has been a focus in the field of intrusion detection. Current intrusion detection systems are primarily based on single-point monitoring and detection and cannot detect attack modes with a hidden attack frequency. The idea presented in this paper is the incorporation of API call sequence software into the analysis and the construction of behavior chains to express the behavior patterns in software. This paper introduces related definitions of behavioral points and behaviors and proposes a depth-detection method for malware based on behavior chains (MALDC). The method monitors behavior points based on API calls and then uses the calling sequence of those behavior points at runtime to construct a behavior chain. Finally, we use depth detection method based on long short-term memory(LSTM) to detect malicious behavior from the behavior chains. To verify the performance of the proposed model, we conducted a large experiment on 54,324 malware and 53,361 benign samples collected from Windows systems and used those samples to train and test the model. Comparative verification by using various classifiers showed that the behavior points extracted based on the above method and the constructed behavior chains can be used to recognize malicious behavior at a high recognition rate. The method achieved an accuracy of 98.64% with a false positive rate of less than 2% in the best case, which is a satisfactory recognition rate for detecting malicious software behavior.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the volunteers for capturing the data. This research is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2017YFB1401300, 2017YFB1401304), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61702211,No. L1724007), the Hubei Provincial Science and Technology Program of China (No. 2017AKA191) and the Self-Determined Research Funds of CCNU from the Colleges’ Basic Research (Nos. CCNU17QN0004 and CCNU17GF0002), and Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province(ZR2017QF015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Engineering Laboratory for Educational Big Data, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China

    Hao Zhang, Wenjun Zhang & Tao Huang

  2. National Engineering Research Center for E-Learning, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China

    Hao Zhang, Wenjun Zhang & Tao Huang

  3. School of Data Science and Software Engineering, Qingdao University, Qingdao, 266071, China

    Zhihan Lv

  4. School of Computing Science and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, 632014, India

    Arun Kumar Sangaiah

  5. Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

    Naveen Chilamkurti

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  1. Hao Zhang
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Zhihan Lv or Arun Kumar Sangaiah.

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This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Special Issue on Security and Privacy in Network Computing

Guest Editors: Xiaohong Jiang, Yongzhi Wang, Tarik Taleb, and Hua Wang

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Zhang, H., Zhang, W., Lv, Z. et al. MALDC: a depth detection method for malware based on behavior chains. World Wide Web 23, 991–1010 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-019-00675-z

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