Empirical Network Structure of Malicious Programs

TL;DR

This paper empirically analyzes the structural properties of malicious program networks, revealing scale-free and small-world characteristics, to enhance understanding and classification of executable program structures.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of malicious binary networks, uncovering their scale-free and small-world properties, and introduces a more detailed feature set for program classification.

Findings

Control flow and data dependency graphs are scale-free.

Data dependency graphs exhibit small-world properties.

Control flow graphs have neutral degree assortativity.

Abstract

A modern binary executable is a composition of various networks. Control flow graphs are commonly used to represent an executable program in labeled datasets used for classification tasks. Control flow and term representations are widely adopted, but provide only a partial view of program semantics. This study is an empirical analysis of the networks composing malicious binaries in order to provide a complete representation of the structural properties of a program. This is accomplished by the measurement of structural properties of program networks in a malicious binary executable dataset. We demonstrate the presence of Scale-Free properties of network structure for program data dependency and control flow graphs, and show that data dependency graphs also have Small-World structural properties. We show that program data dependency graphs have a degree correlation that is structurally disassortative, and that control flow graphs have a neutral degree assortativity, indicating the use of random graphs to model the structural properties of program control flow graphs would show increased accuracy. By providing an increase in feature resolution within labeled datasets of executable programs we provide a quantitative basis to interpret the results of classifiers trained on CFG graph features. An increase in feature resolution allows for the structural properties of program classes to be analyzed for patterns as well as their component parts. By capturing a complete picture of program graphs we can enable theoretical solutions for the mapping a program's operational semantics to its structure.