Escape from Monkey Island: ? Evading High-Interaction Honeyclients
Escape from Monkey Island: ? Evading High-Interaction Honeyclients Alexandros Kapravelos1, Marco Cova2, Christopher Kruegel1, Giovanni Vigna1 1 UC Santa Barbara {kapravel,chris,vigna}@cs.ucsb.edu 2 University of Birmingham, UK {m.cova}@cs.bham.ac.uk Abstract. High-interaction honeyclients are the tools of choice to detect mali- cious web pages that launch drive-by-download attacks. Unfortunately, the ap- proach used by these tools, which, in most cases, is to identify the side-effects of a successful attack rather than the attack itself, leaves open the possibility for malicious pages to perform evasion techniques that allow one to execute an at- tack without detection or to behave in a benign way when being analyzed. In this paper, we examine the security model that high-interaction honeyclients use and evaluate their weaknesses in practice. We introduce and discuss a number of possible attacks, and we test them against several popular, well-known high- interaction honeyclients. Our attacks evade the detection of these tools, while successfully attacking regular visitors of malicious web pages. 1 Introduction In a drive-by-download attack, a user is lured into visiting a malicious web page, which contains code that exploits vulnerabilities in the user’s browser and/or its environment. If successful, the exploits can execute arbitrary code on the victim’s machine [33]. This ability is typically used to automatically download and run malware programs on the compromised machine, which, as a consequence, often becomes part of a botnet [31]. Drive-by-download attacks are one of the most pervasive threats on the web, and past measurements have found millions of malicious web pages [3, 32].
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