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On the Possibility of Evasion Attacks with Macro Malware

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Soft Computing for Security Applications

Abstract

To detect unknown malware, several methods with machine learning techniques have been proposed. These methods extract the features of malware, and thereby classify samples as malicious or benign. The previous method extracts words from the source code and detects macro malware. This method constructs a language model latent semantic indexing (LSI) to extract the features. On the other hand, several methods to avoid the detection have been proposed. These methods add benign features to the source code for Android malware. These methods can be applied to the macro malware. In this study, we discuss the risk of macro malware that evades detection. This paper attempts to imitate benign macros by adding benign features to macromalware. Our method extracts the variables from macro malware and replaces them to frequent words of benign macros. Furthermore, our method inserts the frequent words that appear in benign macros or the LSI topics. These words are inserted as the arguments of some functions, which do not vary the main behavior. The target detection model is our previous method, which detects macromalware with language models: Bag of words (BoW) and LSI. The detection rate is evaluated under two conditions that the attacker can access inside the model or not. As a result, the detection rate with BoW decreases to 1.5% under the situation that the attacker can access inside the model. Even if the attacker cannot access inside the model, the detection rate with LSI decreases by 73%.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://docs.broadcom.com/docs/istr-24-2019-en.

  2. 2.

    https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/.

  3. 3.

    https://scikit-learn.org/stable/.

  4. 4.

    https://www.virustotal.com/.

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Correspondence to Mamoru Mimura .

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Yamamoto, R., Mimura, M. (2022). On the Possibility of Evasion Attacks with Macro Malware. In: Ranganathan, G., Fernando, X., Shi, F., El Allioui, Y. (eds) Soft Computing for Security Applications . Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1397. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5301-8_4

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