HEMC: a dynamic behaviour analysis system for malware based on hardware virtualisation
by Zhenquan Ding; Hui Xu; Lei Cui; Haiqiang Fei; Yongji Liu; Zhiyu Hao
International Journal of Information and Computer Security (IJICS), Vol. 22, No. 3/4, 2023

Abstract: Since many malwares disguise themselves by encrypting, obfuscating and recompiling, it is not easy for static analysis methods to recognise new or unknown malwares. This paper proposes a novel dynamic analysis technology based on hardware virtualisation to analyse more malwares with lower computational resources. Firstly, it intercepts the system-call functions to achieve on-demand behaviour analysis by setting special permissions in their physical addresses, which can be dynamically acquired when system-call functions are loaded into memory, as well as only monitoring high-risk functions, which take a small part of the whole functions. Then, this paper utilises copy-on-write technique and incremental image capability to reduce hard drive consumption and hard disk replication time. Finally, this paper proposes a novel approach to capture the return value of system-call functions to deeply analyse the poisoned results of malware samples. Meanwhile, a prototype system, called HEMC, is implemented based on QEMU/KVM . The experiments demonstrate that proposed methods outperform existing methods in efficiency and performance on malware dynamic analysis.

Online publication date: Tue, 09-Jan-2024

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