From: InformationWeek | DarkReading
Hostile software is ever evolving, and Black Hat-associated research is one of the key loci of information on monitoring, defending against, and nullifying it. With that in mind, today we’ll preview a quartet of interesting malware-related Briefings from Black Hat Asia 2015.
Malware commonly turns to API-wrapping techniques to obfuscate API calls, which makes it difficult to reverse-engineer the code. The old way of dealing with this, binary pattern matching, is easily defeated by simply changing the obfuscation pattern. What’s needed is a more robust deobfuscation scheme … how about one based on memory access analysis? API Deobfuscator: Identifying Runtime-Obfuscated API Calls via Memory Access Analysis will detail just such a scheme, which can generate maps between obfuscated API calls and their true invocations. And so the arms race continues.
***
The Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) comprises a number of open standards meant to enumerate system vulnerabilities and malware characteristics via components like Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), Common Configuration Enumeration (CCE), and Malware Attribute Enumeration and Characterization (MAEC), which all capture high-fidelity data in XML. Unfortunately, their XML schemes lack mutual compatibility, making deeper cross-analysis difficult. Security Content Metadata Model with an Efficient Search Methodology for Real Time Monitoring and Threat Intelligence proposes a low-impact way to modify these schema which will result in more powerful analyses that can resolve vulnerabilities before they’re exploited.
Leave a Reply