Visualization of shared system call sequence relationships in large malware corpora
Josh Saxe, David Mentis, Chris Greamo · 2012
We present a novel system for automatically discovering and interactively visualizing shared system call sequence relationships within large malware datasets. Our system's pipeline begins with the application of a novel heuristic algorithm for extracting variable length, semantically meaningful system call sequences from malware system call behavior logs. Then, based on the occurrence of these semantic sequences, we construct a Boolean vector representation of the malware sample corpus. Finally we compute Jaccard indices pairwise over sample vectors to obtain a sample similarity matrix. Our graphical user interface links two visualizations within an interactive display. Our first view is a map-like visualization of similarity among the samples based on a reduced dimensional projection of our similarity matrix.