Automatic analysis of malware behavior using machine learning

Malicious software – so called malware – poses a major threat to the security of computer systems. The amount and diversity of its variants render classic security defenses ineffective, such that millions of hosts in the Internet are infected with malware in the form of computer viruses, Internet worms and Trojan horses. While obfuscation and polymorphism employed by malware largely impede detection at file level, the dynamic analysis of malware binaries during run-time provides an instrument for characterizing and defending against the threat of malicious software. In this article, we propose a framework for the automatic analysis of malware behavior using machine learning. The framework allows for…