Statically Dissecting Internet of Things Malware: Analysis, Characterization, and Detection

Software vulnerabilities in emerging systems, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), allow for multiple attack vectors that are exploited by adversaries for malicious intents. One of such vectors is malware, where limited efforts have been dedicated to IoT malware analysis, characterization, and understanding. In this paper, we analyze recent IoT malware through the lenses of static analysis. Towards this, we reverse-engineer and perform a detailed analysis of almost 2,900 IoT malware samples of eight different architectures across multiple analysis directions. We conduct string analysis, unveiling operation, unique textual characteristics, and network dependencies. Through the control flow graph analysis, we unveil unique graph-theoretic features. Through the function analysis, we address obfuscation by function approximation. We then pursue two applications based on our analysis: 1) Combining various analysis aspects, we reconstruct the infection lifecycle of various prominent malware families, and 2) using multiple classes of features obtained from our static analysis, we design a machine learning-based detection model with features that are robust and an average detection rate of 99.8%.