A Planning Approach to Monitoring Computer Programs’ Behavior

Alexandre Cukier, Ronen I. Brafman, Yotam Perkal, David Tolpin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

We describe a novel approach to monitoring high level behaviors using concepts from AI planning. Our goal is to understand what a program is doing based on its system call trace. This ability is particularly important for detecting malware. We approach this problem by building an abstract model of the operating system using the STRIPS planning language, casting system calls as planning operators. Given a system call trace, we simulate the corresponding operators on our model and by observing the properties of the state reached, we learn about the nature of the original program and its behavior. Thus, unlike most statistical detection methods that focus on syntactic features, our approach is semantic in nature. Therefore, it is more robust against obfuscation techniques used by malware that change the outward appearance of the trace but not its effect. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by evaluating it on actual system call traces.

Original languageAmerican English
Title of host publicationCyber Security Cryptography and Machine Learning - Second International Symposium, CSCML 2018, Proceedings
EditorsItai Dinur, Shlomi Dolev, Sachin Lodha
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages243-254
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)9783319941462
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2018
Event2nd International Symposium on Cyber Security Cryptography and Machine Learning, CSCML 2018 - Beer-Sheva, Israel
Duration: 21 Jun 201822 Jun 2018

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume10879 LNCS

Conference

Conference2nd International Symposium on Cyber Security Cryptography and Machine Learning, CSCML 2018
Country/TerritoryIsrael
CityBeer-Sheva
Period21/06/1822/06/18

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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