On the Feasibility of Online Malware Detection with Performance Counters John Demme Matthew Maycock Jared Schmitz Adrian Tang Adam Waksman Simha Sethumadhavan Salvatore Stolfo Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, NY, NY 10027
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[email protected] ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION The proliferation of computers in any domain is followed by Malware { short for malicious software { is everywhere. the proliferation of malware in that domain. Systems, in- In various forms for a variety of incentives, malware exists cluding the latest mobile platforms, are laden with viruses, on desktop PCs, server systems and even mobile devices like rootkits, spyware, adware and other classes of malware. De- smart phones and tablets. Some malware litter devices with spite the existence of anti-virus software, malware threats unwanted advertisements, creating ad revenue for the mal- persist and are growing as there exist a myriad of ways to ware creator. Others can dial and text so-called \premium" subvert anti-virus (AV) software. In fact, attackers today services resulting in extra phone bill charges. Some other exploit bugs in the AV software to break into systems. malware is even more insidious, hiding itself (via rootkits or In this paper, we examine the feasibility of building a mal- background processes) and collecting private data like GPS ware detector in hardware using existing performance coun- location or confidential documents. ters. We find that data from performance counters can be This scourge of malware persists despite the existence of used to identify malware and that our detection techniques many forms of protection software, antivirus (AV) software are robust to minor variations in malware programs.