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Abstract. 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. PEMiner 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.

Run-time monitoring of program execution behavior is widely used to discriminate between benign and malicious processes running on an end-host. Towards this end, most of the existing run-time intrusion or malware detection techniques utilize information available in Windows Application Programming Interface (API) call arguments or sequences. In comparison, the key novelty of our proposed tool is the use of statistical features which are extracted from both spatial (arguments) and temporal (sequences) information available in Windows API calls. We provide this composite feature set as an input to standard machine learning algorithms to raise the final alarm. The results of our experiments show that the concurrent analysis of spatio-temporal features improves the detection accuracy of all classifiers. We also perform the scalability analysis to identify a minimal subset of API categories to be monitored whilst maintaining high detection accuracy.

Abstract. Smart phones are now being used to store users' identities and sensitive information/data. Therefore, it is important to authenticate legitimate users of a smart phone and to block imposters. In this paper, we demonstrate that keystroke dynamics of a smart phone user can be translated into a viable feature set for accurate user identification. To this end, we collect and analyze keystroke data of 25 diverse smart phone users. Based on this analysis, we select six distinguishing keystroke features that can be used for user identification. We show that these keystroke features for different users are diffused and therefore a fuzzy classifier is well-suited to cluster and classify them. We then optimize the front-end fuzzy classifier using Particle Swarm Optimizer (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) as back-end dynamic optimizers to adapt to variations in usage patterns. Finally, we provide a novel keystroke dynamics based PIN verification mode to ensure information security on smart phones. The results of our experiments show that the proposed user identification system has an average error rate of 2% after the detection mode and the error rate of rejecting legitimate users is dropped to zero after the PIN verification mode. We also compare error rates (in terms of detecting both legitimate users and imposters) of our proposed classifier with 5 existing state-of-the-art techniques for user identification on desktop computers. Our results show that the proposed technique consistently and considerably outperforms existing schemes.