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Malware Detection Using Automated Generation of Yara Rules on Dynamic Features

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Science of Cyber Security (SciSec 2022)

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Abstract

With the explosive growth of malware and its variants, automated malware detection is a hot topic in security. In this paper, we propose a malware detection method based on automated Yara rule generation on dynamic behaviors, mainly aiming to improve malware detection in terms of automation and effectiveness. Firstly, we extract the API call sequences as features from dynamic behaviors obtained in the sandbox. Secondly, we focus on the impact of runtime parameters containing significant semantic information in API calls on maliciousness discrimination. Then, we leverage random forest and logistic regression algorithms in YaraML to calculate weights for features extracted from API calls and runtime parameters and output a set of Yara rules. Finally, we use these Yara rules to perform malware detection. We conduct a set of experiments on a dataset of malicious samples and benign samples. The experimental results show that our method is effective in terms of accuracy and precision upon malware detection.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62072453, 61972392), Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. 2020164).

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Correspondence to Hui Xu .

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Si, Q. et al. (2022). Malware Detection Using Automated Generation of Yara Rules on Dynamic Features. In: Su, C., Sakurai, K., Liu, F. (eds) Science of Cyber Security. SciSec 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13580. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17551-0_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17551-0_21

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-17550-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-17551-0

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