Malware MultiVerse: From Automatic Logic Bomb Identification to Automatic Patching and Tracing

• Main Authors: Botacin, Marcus, Grégio, André
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 13.09.2021
• Subjects: Computer Science - Cryptography and Security
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2109.06127

Malware and other suspicious software often hide behaviors and components behind logic bombs and context-sensitive execution paths. Uncovering these is essential to react against modern threats, but current solutions are not ready to detect these paths in a completely automated manner. To bridge this gap, we propose the Malware Multiverse (MalVerse), a solution able to inspect multiple execution paths via symbolic execution aiming to discover function inputs and returns that trigger malicious behaviors. MalVerse automatically patches the context-sensitive functions with the identified symbolic values to allow the software execution in a traditional sandbox. We implemented MalVerse on top of angr and evaluated it with a set of Linux and Windows evasive samples. We found that MalVerse was able to generate automatic patches for the most common evasion techniques (e.g., ptrace checks).