Using different substitution matrices in a string-matching technique for identifying viral polymorphic malware variants
Vijay Naidu, Ajit Narayanan · 2016
Antivirus systems have difficulty in detecting polymorphic variants of known viruses without explicit signatures for such variants. Initial work on investigating efficient and effective string-based approaches for the automatic generation of signatures for the identification of some or all new polymorphic variants, was initially encouraging. That initial work was restricted by a number of experimental aspects. The aim of the research reported here is to examine the effects of using different substitution matrices in a string-based methods for the automatic generation of signatures for the detection of some or all new polymorphic variants. We establish how our proposed syntactic-based method using the well-known string matching Smith-Waterman algorithm can successfully identify the known polymorphic variants of JS. Cassandra virus. Our string-matching technique may metamorphose our understanding of polymorphic variant generation and may lead to a new phase of syntactic-based anti-viral software.