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An unknown Trojan detection method based on software network behavior

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Wuhan University Journal of Natural Sciences

Abstract

Aiming at the difficulty of unknown Trojan detection in the APT flooding situation, an improved detecting method has been proposed. The basic idea of this method originates from advanced persistent threat (APT) attack intents: besides dealing with damaging or destroying facilities, the more essential purpose of APT attacks is to gather confidential data from target hosts by planting Trojans. Inspired by this idea and some in-depth analyses on recently happened APT attacks, five typical communication characteristics are adopted to describe application’s network behavior, with which a fine-grained classifier based on Decision Tree and Naïve Bayes is modeled. Finally, with the training of supervised machine learning approaches, the classification detection method is implemented. Compared with general methods, this method is capable of enhancing the detection and awareness capability of unknown Trojans with less resource consumption.

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Correspondence to Guojun Peng.

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Foundation item: Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61202387, 61103220), Major Projects of National Science and Technology of China(2010ZX03006-001-01), Doctoral Fund of Ministry of Education of China (2012014110002), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2012M510641), Hubei Province Natural Science Foundation (2011CDB456), and Wuhan Chenguang Plan Project(2012710367)

Biography: LIANG Yu, male, Ph.D. candidate, research direction: network and information system security.

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Liang, Y., Peng, G., Zhang, H. et al. An unknown Trojan detection method based on software network behavior. Wuhan Univ. J. Nat. Sci. 18, 369–376 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11859-013-0944-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11859-013-0944-6

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