MetaHunt: Towards Taming Malware Mutation via Studying the Evolution of Metamorphic Virus Li Wang Dongpeng Xu Jiang Ming
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] The Pennsylvania State University University of New Hampshire University of Texas at Arlington University Park, PA 16802, USA Durham, NH 03824, USA Arlington, TX 76019, USA Yu Fu Dinghao Wu
[email protected] [email protected] The Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802, USA University Park, PA 16802, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS As the underground industry of malware prospers, malware de- Malware detection, metamorphic virus, binary diffing, binary code velopers consistently attempt to camouflage malicious code and semantics analysis undermine malware detection with various obfuscation schemes. ACM Reference Format: Among them, metamorphism is known to have the potential to Li Wang, Dongpeng Xu, Jiang Ming, Yu Fu, and Dinghao Wu. 2019. Meta- defeat the popular signature-based malware detection. A meta- Hunt: Towards Taming Malware Mutation via Studying the Evolution of morphic malware sample mutates its code during propagations so Metamorphic Virus. In 3rd Software Protection Workshop (SPRO’19), Novem- that each instance of the same family exhibits little resemblance to ber 15, 2019, London, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. another variant. Especially with the development of compiler and https://doi.org/10.1145/3338503.3357720 binary rewriting techniques, metamorphic malware will become much easier to develop and outbreak eventually. To fully under- stand the metamorphic engine, the core part of the metamorphic 1 INTRODUCTION malware, we attempt to systematically study the evolution of me- The malicious software (malware) underground market has evolved tamorphic malware over time.