Faculty Publications
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Item VMI based automated real-time malware detector for virtualized cloud environment(Springer Verlag service@springer.de, 2016) M.a, M.A.; Jaidhar, C.D.The Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) has evolved as a promising future security solution to performs an indirect investigation of the untrustworthy Guest Virtual Machine (GVM) in real-time by operating at the hypervisor in a virtualized cloud environment. The existing VMI techniques are not intelligent enough to read precisely the manipulated semantic information on their reconstructed high-level semantic view of the live GVM. In this paper, a VMI-based Automated-Internal- External (A-IntExt) system is presented that seamlessly introspects the untrustworthy Windows GVM internal semantic view (i.e. Processes) to detect the hidden, dead, and malicious processes. Further, it checks the detected, hidden as well as running processes (not hidden) as benign or malicious. The prime component of the A-IntExt is the Intelligent Cross- View Analyzer (ICV A), which is responsible for detecting hidden-state information from internally and externally gathered state information of the Monitored Virtual Machine (Med−VM). The A-IntExt is designed, implemented, and evaluated by using publicly available malware and Windows real-world rootkits to measure detection proficiency as well as execution speed. The experimental results demonstrate that A-IntExt is effective in detecting malicious and hidden-state information rapidly with maximum performance overhead of 7.2 %. © Springer International Publishing AG 2016.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.Item An empirical study to estimate the stability of random forest classifier on the hybrid features recommended by filter based feature selection technique(Springer, 2020) Shiva Darshan, S.L.S.; Jaidhar, C.D.The emergence of advanced malware is a serious threat to information security. A prominent technique that identifies sophisticated malware should consider the runtime behaviour of the source file to detect malicious intent. Although the behaviour-based malware detection technique is a substantial improvement over the traditional signature-based detection technique, current malware employs code obfuscation techniques to elude detection. This paper presents the Hybrid Features-based malware detection system (HFMDS) that integrates static and dynamic features of the portable executable (PE) files to discern malware. The HFMDS is trained with prominent features advised by the filter-based feature selection technique (FST). The detection ability of the proposed HFMDS has evaluated with the random forest (RF) classifier by considering two different datasets that consist of real-world Windows malware samples. In-depth analysis is carried out to determine the optimal number of decision trees (DTs) required by the RF classifier to achieve consistent accuracy. Besides, four popular FSTs performance is also analyzed to determine which FST recommends the best features. From the experimental analysis, we can infer that increasing the number of DTs after 160 within the RF classifier does not make a significant difference in attaining better detection accuracy. © 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.Item Applicability of machine learning in spam and phishing email filtering: review and approaches(Springer Science+Business Media B.V. editorial@springerplus.com, 2020) Gangavarapu, T.; Jaidhar, C.D.; Chanduka, B.With the influx of technological advancements and the increased simplicity in communication, especially through emails, the upsurge in the volume of unsolicited bulk emails (UBEs) has become a severe threat to global security and economy. Spam emails not only waste users’ time, but also consume a lot of network bandwidth, and may also include malware as executable files. Alternatively, phishing emails falsely claim users’ personal information to facilitate identity theft and are comparatively more dangerous. Thus, there is an intrinsic need for the development of more robust and dependable UBE filters that facilitate automatic detection of such emails. There are several countermeasures to spam and phishing, including blacklisting and content-based filtering. However, in addition to content-based features, behavior-based features are well-suited in the detection of UBEs. Machine learning models are being extensively used by leading internet service providers like Yahoo, Gmail, and Outlook, to filter and classify UBEs successfully. There are far too many options to consider, owing to the need to facilitate UBE detection and the recent advances in this domain. In this paper, we aim at elucidating on the way of extracting email content and behavior-based features, what features are appropriate in the detection of UBEs, and the selection of the most discriminating feature set. Furthermore, to accurately handle the menace of UBEs, we facilitate an exhaustive comparative study using several state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Our proposed models resulted in an overall accuracy of 99% in the classification of UBEs. The text is accompanied by snippets of Python code, to enable the reader to implement the approaches elucidated in this paper. © 2020, Springer Nature B.V.Item Windows malware detector using convolutional neural network based on visualization images(IEEE Computer Society, 2021) Shiva Darshan, S.L.; Jaidhar, C.D.The evolution of malware is continuing at an alarming rate, despite the efforts made towards detecting and mitigating them. Malware analysis is needed to defend against its sophisticated behaviour. However, the manual heuristic inspection is no longer effective or efficient. To cope with these critical issues, behaviour-based malware detection approaches with machine learning techniques have been widely adopted as a solution. It involves supervised classifiers to appraise their predictive performance on gaining the most relevant features from the original features' set and the trade-off between high detection rate and low computation overhead. Though machine learning-based malware detection techniques have exhibited success in detecting malware, their shallow learning architecture is still deficient in identifying sophisticated malware. Therefore, in this paper, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based Windows malware detector has been proposed that uses the execution time behavioural features of the Portable Executable (PE) files to detect and classify obscure malware. The 10-fold cross-validation tests were conducted to assess the proficiency of the proposed approach. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach was effective in uncovering malware PE files by utilizing significant behavioural features suggested by the Relief Feature Selection Technique. It attained detection accuracy of 97.968 percent. © 2013 IEEE.