Faculty Publications
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Publications by NITK Faculty
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Item Leveraging virtual machine introspection with memory forensics to detect and characterize unknown malware using machine learning techniques at hypervisor(Elsevier Ltd, 2017) M.a, M.A.; Jaidhar, C.D.The Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) has emerged as a fine-grained, out-of-VM security solution that detects malware by introspecting and reconstructing the volatile memory state of the live guest Operating System (OS). Specifically, it functions by the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM), or hypervisor. The reconstructed semantic details obtained by the VMI are available in a combination of benign and malicious states at the hypervisor. In order to distinguish between these two states, the existing out-of-VM security solutions require extensive manual analysis. In this paper, we propose an advanced VMM-based, guest-assisted Automated Internal-and-External (A-IntExt) introspection system by leveraging VMI, Memory Forensics Analysis (MFA), and machine learning techniques at the hypervisor. Further, we use the VMI-based technique to introspect digital artifacts of the live guest OS to obtain a semantic view of the processes details. We implemented an Intelligent Cross View Analyzer (ICVA) and implanted it into our proposed A-IntExt system, which examines the data supplied by the VMI to detect hidden, dead, and dubious processes, while also predicting early symptoms of malware execution on the introspected guest OS in a timely manner. Machine learning techniques are used to analyze the executables that are mined and extracted using MFA-based techniques and ascertain the malicious executables. The practicality of the A-IntExt system is evaluated by executing large real-world malware and benign executables onto the live guest OSs. The evaluation results achieved 99.55% accuracy and 0.004 False Positive Rate (FPR) on the 10-fold cross-validation to detect unknown malware on the generated dataset. Additionally, the proposed system was validated against other benchmarked malware datasets and the A-IntExt system outperforms the detection of real-world malware at the VMM with performance exceeding 6.3%. © 2017 Elsevier LtdItem Automated multi-level malware detection system based on reconstructed semantic view of executables using machine learning techniques at VMM(Elsevier B.V., 2018) M.a, A.K.; Jaidhar, C.D.In order to fulfill the requirements like stringent timing restraints and demand on resources, Cyber–Physical System (CPS) must deploy on the virtualized environment such as cloud computing. To protect Virtual Machines (VMs) in which CPSs are functioning against malware-based attacks, malware detection and mitigation technique is emerging as a highly crucial concern. The traditional VM-based anti-malware software themselves a potential target for malware-based attack since they are easily subverted by sophisticated malware. Thus, a reliable and robust malware monitoring and detection systems are needed to detect and mitigate rapidly the malware based cyber-attacks in real time particularly for virtualized environment. The Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) has emerged as a fine-grained out-of-VM security solution to detect malware by introspecting and reconstructing the volatile memory state of the live guest Operating System (OS) by functioning at the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) or hypervisor. However, the reconstructed semantic details by the VMI are available in a combination of benign and malicious states at the hypervisor. In order to distinguish between these two states, extensive manual analysis is required by the existing out-of-VM security solutions. To address the foremost issue, in this paper, we propose an advanced VMM-based guest-assisted Automated Multilevel Malware Detection System (AMMDS) that leverages both VMI and Memory Forensic Analysis (MFA) techniques to predict early symptoms of malware execution by detecting stealthy hidden processes on a live guest OS. More specifically, the AMMDS system detects and classifies the actual running malicious executables from the semantically reconstructed process view of the guest OS. The two sub-components of the AMMDS are: Online Malware Detector (OMD) and Offline Malware Classifier (OFMC). The OMD recognizes whether the running processes are benign or malicious using its Local Malware Signature Database (LMSD) and online malware scanner and the OFMC classify unknown malware by adopting machine learning techniques at the hypervisor. The AMMDS has been evaluated by executing large real-world malware and benign executables on to the live guest OSs. The evaluation results achieved 100% of accuracy and zero False Positive Rate (FPR) on the 10-fold cross-validation in classifying unknown malware with maximum performance overhead of 5.8%. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.Item Windows malware detection system based on LSVC recommended hybrid features(Springer-Verlag France 22, Rue de Palestro Paris 75002, 2019) Shiva Darshan, S.L.; Jaidhar, C.D.To combat exponentially evolved modern malware, an effective Malware Detection System and precise malware classification is highly essential. In this paper, the Linear Support Vector Classification (LSVC) recommended Hybrid Features based Malware Detection System (HF-MDS) has been proposed. It uses a combination of the static and dynamic features of the Portable Executable (PE) files as hybrid features to identify unknown malware. The application program interface calls invoked by the PE files during their execution along with their correspondent category are collected and considered as dynamic features from the PE file behavioural report produced by the Cuckoo Sandbox. The PE files’ header details such as optional header, disk operating system header, and file header are treated as static features. The LSVC is used as a feature selector to choose prominent static and dynamic features from their respective Original Feature Space. The features recommended by the LSVC are highly discriminative and used as final features for the classification process. Different sets of experiments were conducted using real-world malware samples to verify the combination of static and dynamic features, which encourage the classifier to attain high accuracy. The tenfold cross-validation experimental results demonstrate that the proposed HF-MDS is proficient in precisely detecting malware and benign PE files by attaining detection accuracy of 99.743% with sequential minimal optimization classifier consisting of hybrid features. © 2018, Springer-Verlag France SAS, part of Springer Nature.Item Experimental analysis of Android malware detection based on combinations of permissions and API-calls(Springer-Verlag France 22, Rue de Palestro Paris 75002, 2019) Singh, A.K.; Jaidhar, C.D.; M.a, M.A.A.Android-based smartphones are gaining popularity, due to its cost efficiency and various applications. These smartphones provide the full experience of a computing device to its user, and usually ends up being used as a personal computer. Since the Android operating system is open-source software, many contributors are adding to its development to make the interface more attractive and tweaking the performance. In order to gain more popularity, many refined versions are being offered to customers, whose feedback will enable it to be made even more powerful and user-friendly. However, this has attracted many malicious code-writers to gain anonymous access to the user’s private data. Moreover, the malware causes an increase of resource consumption. To prevent this, various techniques are currently being used that include static analysis-based detection and dynamic analysis-based detection. But, due to the enhancement in Android malware code-writing techniques, some of these techniques are getting overwhelmed. Therefore, there is a need for an effective Android malware detection approach for which experimental studies were conducted in the present work using the static features of the Android applications such as Standard Permissions with Application Programming Interface (API) calls, Non-standard Permissions with API-calls, API-calls with Standard and Nonstandard Permissions. To select the prominent features, Feature Selection Techniques (FSTs) such as the BI-Normal Separation (BNS), Mutual Information (MI), Relevancy Score (RS), and the Kullback-Leibler (KL) were employed and their effectiveness was measured using the Linear-Support Vector Machine (L-SVM) classifier. It was observed that this classifier achieved Android malware detection accuracy of 99.6% for the combined features as recommended by the BI-Normal Separation FST. © 2019, Springer-Verlag France SAS, part of Springer Nature.