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Automatically Inferring Malware Signatures for Anti-Virus Assisted Attacks

Published: 02 April 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Although anti-virus software has significantly evolved over the last decade, classic signature matching based on byte patterns is still a prevalent concept for identifying security threats. Anti-virus signatures are a simple and fast detection mechanism that can complement more sophisticated analysis strategies. However, if signatures are not designed with care, they can turn from a defensive mechanism into an instrument of attack. In this paper, we present a novel method for automatically deriving signatures from anti-virus software and discuss how the extracted signatures can be used to attack sensible data with the aid of the virus scanner itself. To this end, we study the practicability of our approach using four commercial products and exemplary demonstrate anti-virus assisted attacks in three different scenarios.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ASIA CCS '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security
    April 2017
    952 pages
    ISBN:9781450349444
    DOI:10.1145/3052973
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    Published: 02 April 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. anti-virus
    2. attacks
    3. malware
    4. signatures

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    ASIA CCS '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 67 of 359 submissions, 19%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 418 of 2,322 submissions, 18%

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