POSTER: Leveraging Spectral Representations of Control Flow Graphs for Efficient Analysis of Windows Malware

Qirui Sun, Eldor Abdukhamidov, Tamer Abuhmed, Mohammed Abuhamad

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

9 Scopus citations

Abstract

The rapid pace of malware development and the widespread use of code obfuscation, polymorphism, and morphing techniques pose a considerable challenge to detecting and analyzing malware. Today, it is difficult for antivirus applications to use traditional signature-based detection methods to detect morphing malware. Thus, the emergence of structure graph-based detection methods has become a hope to solve this challenge. In this work, we propose a method for detecting malware using graphs' spectral heat and wave signatures, which are efficient and size- and permutation-invariant. We extracted 250 and 1,000 heat and wave representations, and we trained and tested heat and wave representations on eight machine learning classifiers. We used a dataset of 37,537 unpacked Windows malware executables and extracted the control flow graph (CFG) of each windows malware to obtain the spectral representations. Our experimental results showed that by using heat and wave spectral graph theory, the best malware analysis accuracy reached 95.9%.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationASIA CCS 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages1240-1242
Number of pages3
ISBN (Electronic)9781450391405
DOIs
StatePublished - 30 May 2022
Event17th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2022, ASIA CCS 2022 - Virtual, Online, Japan
Duration: 30 May 20223 Jun 2022

Publication series

NameASIA CCS 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Conference

Conference17th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2022, ASIA CCS 2022
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityVirtual, Online
Period30/05/223/06/22

Keywords

  • malware detection
  • size-invariant representations
  • spectral representation
  • windows executable binaries

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