MalGrid: Visualization Of Binary Features In Large Malware Corpora
- Resource Type
- Working Paper
- Authors
- Mohammed, Tajuddin Manhar; Nataraj, Lakshmanan; Chikkagoudar, Satish; Chandrasekaran, Shivkumar; Manjunath, B. S.
- Source
- Subject
- Computer Science - Cryptography and Security
Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Science - Human-Computer Interaction
Computer Science - Machine Learning
Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Image and Video Processing
Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Signal Processing
- Language
The number of malware is constantly on the rise. Though most new malware are modifications of existing ones, their sheer number is quite overwhelming. In this paper, we present a novel system to visualize and map millions of malware to points in a 2-dimensional (2D) spatial grid. This enables visualizing relationships within large malware datasets that can be used to develop triage solutions to screen different malware rapidly and provide situational awareness. Our approach links two visualizations within an interactive display. Our first view is a spatial point-based visualization of similarity among the samples based on a reduced dimensional projection of binary feature representations of malware. Our second spatial grid-based view provides a better insight into similarities and differences between selected malware samples in terms of the binary-based visual representations they share. We also provide a case study where the effect of packing on the malware data is correlated with the complexity of the packing algorithm.
Comment: Submitted version - MILCOM 2022 IEEE Military Communications Conference. The high-quality images in this paper can be found on Github (https://github.com/Mayachitra-Inc/MalGrid)