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Idea: Opcode-Sequence-Based Malware Detection

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Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSoS 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 5965))

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Abstract

Malware is every malicious code that has the potential to harm any computer or network. The amount of malware is increasing faster every year and poses a serious security threat. Hence, malware detection has become a critical topic in computer security. Currently, signature-based detection is the most extended method within commercial antivirus. Although this method is still used on most popular commercial computer antivirus software, it can only achieve detection once the virus has already caused damage and it is registered. Therefore, it fails to detect new variations of known malware. In this paper, we propose a new method to detect variants of known malware families. This method is based on the frequency of appearance of opcode sequences. Furthermore, we describe a method to mine the relevance of each opcode and, thereby, weigh each opcode sequence frequency. We show that this method provides an effective way to detect variants of known malware families.

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Santos, I. et al. (2010). Idea: Opcode-Sequence-Based Malware Detection. In: Massacci, F., Wallach, D., Zannone, N. (eds) Engineering Secure Software and Systems. ESSoS 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5965. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11747-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11747-3_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-11746-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-11747-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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