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Robust Fingerprinting for Relocatable Code

Published: 02 March 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Robust fingerprinting of executable code contained in a memory image is a prerequisite for a large number of security and forensic applications, especially in a cloud environment. Prior state of the art has focused specifically on identifying kernel versions by means of complex differential analysis of several aspects of the kernel code implementation.
In this work, we present a novel technique that can identify any relocatable code, including the kernel, based on inherent patterns present in relocation tables. We show that such patterns are very distinct and can be used to accurately and efficiently identify known executables in a memory snapshot, including remnants of prior executions. We develop a research prototype, codeid, and evaluate its efficacy on more than 50,000 sample executables containing kernels, kernel modules, applications, dynamic link libraries, and malware. The empirical results show that our method achieves almost 100% accuracy with zero false negatives.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CODASPY '15: Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy
March 2015
362 pages
ISBN:9781450331913
DOI:10.1145/2699026
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 March 2015

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Author Tags

  1. cloud securityn
  2. code fingerprinting
  3. codeid
  4. malware detection
  5. memory analisys
  6. virtual machine introspection

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CODASPY '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 19 of 91 submissions, 21%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 149 of 789 submissions, 19%

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