Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top
Published in:
Subverting Operating System Properties Through Evolutionary DKOM Attacks Read chapter Read first chapter

2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Comprehensive Analysis and Detection of Flash-Based Malware

Authors : Christian Wressnegger, Fabian Yamaguchi, Daniel Arp, Konrad Rieck

Published in: Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Log in

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

Adobe Flash is a popular platform for providing dynamic and multimedia content on web pages. Despite being declared dead for years, Flash is still deployed on millions of devices. Unfortunately, the Adobe Flash Player increasingly suffers from vulnerabilities, and attacks using Flash-based malware regularly put users at risk of being remotely attacked. As a remedy, we present Gordon, a method for the comprehensive analysis and detection of Flash-based malware. By analyzing Flash animations at different levels during the interpreter’s loading and execution process, our method is able to spot attacks against the Flash Player as well as malicious functionality embedded in ActionScript code. To achieve this goal, Gordon combines a structural analysis of the container format with guided execution of the contained code, a novel analysis strategy that manipulates the control flow to maximize the coverage of indicative code regions. In an empirical evaluation with 26,600 Flash samples collected over 12 consecutive weeks, Gordon significantly outperforms related approaches when applied to samples shortly after their first occurrence in the wild, demonstrating its ability to provide timely protection for end users.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe




 

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Versicherung + Risiko




Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now
previous chapter Towards Vulnerability Discovery Using Staged Program Analysis
next chapter Reviewer Integration and Performance Measurement for Malware Detection
Footnotes
1
md5: cac794adea27aa54f2e5ac3151050845.
 
2
md5: 4f293f0bda8f851525f28466882125b7.
 
3
Versions not supported by FlashDetect (version 8 and below) have been excluded.
 
Literature
1.
Adobe Systems Incooperated: ActionScript virtual machine 2 (AVM2) overview. Technical report, Adobe System Incooperated (2007)
2.
Adobe Systems Incooperated: SWF file format specification. Technical report, Adobe System Incooperated (2013)
3.
Aho, A.V., Sethi, R., Ullman, J.D.: Compilers Principles, Techniques, and Tools, 2nd edn. Addison-Wesley, Reading (2006)MATH
4.
Baecher, P., Koetter, M.: libemu - x86 Shellcode Emulation (2008)
5.
Biggio, B., Nelson, B., Laskov, P.: Poisoning attacks against support vector machines. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) (2012)
6.
Brumley, D., Hartwig, C., Liang, Z., Newsome, J., Song, D., Yin, H.: Automatically identifying trigger-based behavior in malware. In: Lee, W., Wang, C., Dagon, D. (eds.) Botnet Detection, pp. 65–88. Springer, US (2008)CrossRef
7.
Canali, D., Cova, M., Vigna, G., Kruegel, C.: Prophiler: a fast filter for the large-scale detection of malicious web pages. In: Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), pp. 197–206, April 2011
8.
Cavallaro, L., Saxena, P., Sekar, R.: On the limits of information flow techniques for malware analysis and containment. In: Zamboni, D. (ed.) DIMVA 2008. LNCS, vol. 5137, pp. 143–163. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)CrossRef
9.
Cavnar, W., Trenkle, J.: N-gram-based text categorization. In: Proceedings of SDAIR, Las Vegas, pp. 161–175, NV, USA, April 1994
10.
Chen, X., Andersen, J., Mao, Z.M., Bailey, M., Nazario, J.: Towards an understanding of anti-virtualization and anti-debugging behavior in modern malware. In: Proceedings of Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), pp. 177–186 (2008)
11.
Cormen, T.H., Leiserson, C.E., Rivest, R.L., Stein, C.: Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd edn. MIT Press, Cambridge (2009)MATH
12.
Cova, M., Felmetsger, V., Banks, G., Vigna, G.: Static detection of vulnerabilities in x86 executables. In: Proceedings of Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), pp. 269–278 (2006)
13.
Cova, M., Kruegel, C., Vigna, G.: Detection and analysis of drive-by-download attacks and malicious JavaScript code. In: Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), pp. 281–290 (2010)
14.
Crandall, J.R., Wassermann, G., Oliveira, D.A.S., Su, Z., Wu, S.F., Chong, F.T.: Temporal search: detecting hidden malware timebombs with virtual machines. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, pp. 25–36 (2006)
15.
Cretu, G., Stavrou, A., Locasto, M., Stolfo, S., Keromytis, A.: Casting out demons: Sanitizing training data for anomaly sensors. In: Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 81–95 (2008)
16.
Curtsinger, C., Livshits, B., Zorn, B., Seifert, C.: Zozzle: fast and precise in-browser JavaScript malware detection. In: Proceedings of USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 33–48 (2011)
17.
Fogla, P., Lee, W.: Evading network anomaly detection systems: formal reasoning and practical techniques. In: Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), pp. 59–68 (2006)
18.
Fogla, P., Sharif, M., Perdisci, R., Kolesnikov, O., Lee, W.: Polymorphic blending attacks. In: Proceedings of USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 241–256 (2006)
19.
Ford, S., Cova, M., Kruegel, C., Vigna, G.: Analyzing and detecting malicious flash advertisements. In: Proceedings of Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), pp. 363–372 (2009)
20.
21.
Hirvonen, T.: Dynamic flash instrumentation for fun and profit. In: Proceedings of Black Hat USA (2014)
22.
23.
Huang, L., Joseph, A.D., Nelson, B., Rubinstein, B.I.P., Tygar, J.D.: Adversarial machine learning. In: Proceedings of ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security (AISEC), pp. 43–58 (2011)
24.
Jang, J., Agrawal, A., Brumley, D.: ReDeBug: finding unpatched code clones in entire os distributions. In: Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 48–62 (2012)
25.
Johns, M., Lekies, S.: Biting the hand that serves you: a closer look at client-side flash proxies for cross-domain requests. In: Holz, T., Bos, H. (eds.) DIMVA 2011. LNCS, vol. 6739, pp. 85–103. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)CrossRef
26.
Kapravelos, A., Shoshitaishvili, Y., Cova, M., Kruegel, C., Vigna, G.: Revolver: an automated approach to the detection of evasive web-based malware. In: Proceedings of USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 637–651, August 2013
27.
Kolbitsch, C., Livshits, B., Zorn, B., Seifert, C.: Rozzle: de-cloaking internet malware. In: Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 443–457 (2012)
28.
Laskov, P., Šrndić, N.: Static detection of malicious javascript-bearing PDF documents. In: Proceedings of Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), pp. 373–382 (2011)
29.
Louw, M.T., Thotta, K., Venkatakrishnan, V.N.: AdJail: practical enforcement of confidentiality and integrity policies on web advertisments. In: Proceedings of USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 371–388 (2010)
30.
Moser, A., Kruegel, C., Kirda, E.: Exploring multiple execution paths for malware analysis. In: Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 231–245 (2007)
31.
Nair, S.K., Simpson, P.N.D., Crispo, B., Tanenbaum, A.S.: A virtual machine based information flow control system for policy enforcement. Electron. Notes Theor. Comput. Sci. (ENTCS) 197(1), 3–16 (2008)CrossRef
32.
33.
Perdisci, R., Ariu, D., Fogla, P., Giacinto, G., Lee, W.: McPAD: a multiple classifier system for accurate payload-based anomaly detection. Comput. Netw. 5(6), 864–881 (2009)CrossRefMATH
34.
35.
Ratanaworabhan, P., Livshits, B., Zorn, B.: Nozzle: a defense against heap-spraying code injection attacks. In: Proceedings of USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 169–186 (2009)
36.
Saxena, P., Akhawe, D., Hanna, S., Mao, F., McCamant, S., Song, D.: A symbolic execution framework for javascript. In: Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 513–528 (2010)
37.
Schölkopf, B., Smola, A.J.: Learning with Kernels. MIT Press, Cambridge (2002)MATH
38.
Sedgewick, R., Wayne, K.: Algorithms, 4th edn. Addison-Wesley, Boston (2011)
39.
Shafiq, M.Z., Khayam, S.A., Farooq, M.: Embedded malware detection using markov n-grams. In: Zamboni, D. (ed.) DIMVA 2008. LNCS, vol. 5137, pp. 88–107. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)CrossRef
40.
Stolfo, S.J., Wang, K., Li, W.-J.: Towards stealthy malware detection. In: Christodorescu, M., Jha, S., Maughan, D., Song, D., Wang, C. (eds.) Malware Detection, pp. 231–249. Springer, USA (2007)CrossRef
41.
Suen, C.: N-gram statistics for natural language understanding, text processing. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 1(2), 164–172 (1979)CrossRef
42.
43.
van Acker, S., Nikiforakis, N., Desmet, L., Joosen, W., Piessens, F.: FlashOver: automated discovery of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in rich internet applications. In: Proceedings of ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS) (2012)
44.
Van Overveldt, T., Kruegel, C., Vigna, G.: FlashDetect: actionscript 3 malware detection. In: Balzarotti, D., Stolfo, S.J., Cova, M. (eds.) RAID 2012. LNCS, vol. 7462, pp. 274–293. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)CrossRef
45.
Šrndić, N., Laskov, P.: Detection of malicious PDF files based on hierarchical document structure. In: Proceedings of Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) (2013)
46.
Wagner, D., Soto, P.: Mimicry attacks on host based intrusion detection systems. In: Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), pp. 255–264 (2002)
47.
Wang, K., Parekh, J.J., Stolfo, S.J.: Anagram: a content anomaly detector resistant to mimicry attack. In: Zamboni, D., Kruegel, C. (eds.) RAID 2006. LNCS, vol. 4219, pp. 226–248. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)CrossRef
48.
Wilhelm, J., Chiueh, T.: A forced sampled execution approach to kernel rootkit identification. In: Kruegel, C., Lippmann, R., Clark, A. (eds.) RAID 2007. LNCS, vol. 4637, pp. 219–235. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)CrossRef
49.
Wook Oh, J.: AVM inception - how we can use AVM instrumentation in a beneficial way. In: Shmoocon (2012)
50.
Wressnegger, C., Boldewin, F., Rieck, K.: Deobfuscating embedded malware using probable-plaintext attacks. In: Stolfo, S.J., Stavrou, A., Wright, C.V. (eds.) RAID 2013. LNCS, vol. 8145, pp. 164–183. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)CrossRef
Metadata
Title
Comprehensive Analysis and Detection of Flash-Based Malware
Authors
Christian Wressnegger
Fabian Yamaguchi
Daniel Arp
Konrad Rieck
Copyright Year
2016
Book
Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-40666-4

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-40667-1

Copyright Year: 2016

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40667-1_6

Premium Partner

    Image Credits