Precise system-wide concatic malware unpacking
This addresses the challenge of malware obfuscation for cybersecurity professionals, offering an incremental advancement in unpacking techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of automatic unpacking of malware samples by introducing Minerva, a tool that uses a unified approach to precisely uncover execution waves and produce PE files suitable for static analysis, showing significant improvements in generality and precision compared to previous work.
Run time packing is a common approach malware use to obfuscate their payloads, and automatic unpacking is, therefore, highly relevant. The problem has received much attention, and so far, solutions based on dynamic analysis have been the most successful. Nevertheless, existing solutions lack in several areas, both conceptually and architecturally, because they focus on a limited part of the unpacking problem. These limitations significantly impact their applicability, and current unpackers have, therefore, experienced limited adoption. In this paper, we introduce a new tool, called Minerva, for effective automatic unpacking of malware samples. Minerva introduces a unified approach to precisely uncover execution waves in a packed malware sample and produce PE files that are well-suited for follow-up static analysis. At the core, Minerva deploys a novel information flow model of system-wide dynamically generated code, precise collection of API calls and a new approach for merging execution waves and API calls. Together, these novelties amplify the generality and precision of automatic unpacking and make the output of Minerva highly usable. We extensively evaluate Minerva against synthetic and real-world malware samples and show that our techniques significantly improve on several aspects compared to previous work.