PE-Miner: Mining Structural Information to Detect Malicious Executables in Realtime

In this paper, we present an accurate and realtime PE-Miner framework that automatically extracts distinguishing features from portable executables (PE) to detect zero-day (i.e. previously unknown) malware. The distinguishing features are extracted using the structural information standardized by the Microsoft Windows operating system for executables, DLLs and object files. We follow a threefold research methodology: (1) identify a set of structural features for PE files which is computable in realtime, (2) use an efficient preprocessor for removing redundancy in the features’ set, and (3) select an efficient data mining algorithm for final classification between benign and malicious executables.

We have evaluated PE-Miner on two malware collections, VX Heavens and Malfease datasets which contain about 11 and 5 thousand malicious PE files respectively. The results of our experiments show that PE-Miner achieves more than 99% detection rate with less than 0.5% false alarm rate for distinguishing between benign and malicious executables. PE-Miner has low processing overheads and takes only 0.244 seconds on the average to scan a given PE file. Finally, we evaluate the robustness and reliability of PE-Miner under several regression tests. Our results show that the extracted features are robust to different packing techniques and PE-Miner is also resilient to majority of crafty evasion strategies.