Malware Sequence Alignment
Andrew Dinh, Daniel Brill, Yaohang Li, Wu He · 2016
Sequence alignment has been used to align DNA sequences to find matching segments of DNA from different specimens. Just as DNA sequences can be used to find similar patterns in DNA, this process can also be used on computer programs to identify when segments of code have been reused. Malware programs generally are made from other malware programs or malware templates. The byte information of these decompiled malware programs can be sequence aligned to identify them as malware from known samples. Although sequence alignment is a time consuming process, when a sequence has been found, this known sample can be used to identify malware files orders of magnitude faster than performing sequence alignment on two complete files.