Web-based mechanisms, often mediated by malicious JavaScript code, play an important role in malware delivery today, making defenses against web-borne malware crucial for system security. This paper explores weaknesses in existing approaches to the detection of malicious JavaScript code. These approaches generally fall into two categories: lightweight techniques focusing on syntactic features such as string obfuscation and dynamic code generation; and heavier-weight approaches that look for deeper semantic characteristics such as the presence of shellcode-like strings or execution of exploit code. We show that each of these approaches has its weaknesses, and that state-of-the-art detectors using these techniques can be defeated using cloaking techniques that combine emulation with dynamic anti-analysis checks. Our goal is to promote a discussion in the research community focusing on robust defensive techniques rather than ad-hoc solutions. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.
CITATION STYLE
Lu, G., & Debray, S. (2013). Weaknesses in defenses against web-borne malware (short paper). In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 7967 LNCS, pp. 139–149). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39235-1_8
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