JABBERWOCK: A Tool for WebAssembly Dataset Generation and Its Application to Malicious Website Detection
This addresses a data scarcity problem for cybersecurity researchers and practitioners, offering an incremental improvement by generating synthetic data to enhance existing detection tools.
The paper tackles the lack of WebAssembly datasets for malicious website detection by proposing JABBERWOCK, a tool that generates pseudo-WebAssembly samples from JavaScript, enabling detection with a 99% F1-score and processing each sample in 4.5 seconds.
Machine learning is often used for malicious website detection, but an approach incorporating WebAssembly as a feature has not been explored due to a limited number of samples, to the best of our knowledge. In this paper, we propose JABBERWOCK (JAvascript-Based Binary EncodeR by WebAssembly Optimization paCKer), a tool to generate WebAssembly datasets in a pseudo fashion via JavaScript. Loosely speaking, JABBERWOCK automatically gathers JavaScript code in the real world, convert them into WebAssembly, and then outputs vectors of the WebAssembly as samples for malicious website detection. We also conduct experimental evaluations of JABBERWOCK in terms of the processing time for dataset generation, comparison of the generated samples with actual WebAssembly samples gathered from the Internet, and an application for malicious website detection. Regarding the processing time, we show that JABBERWOCK can construct a dataset in 4.5 seconds per sample for any number of samples. Next, comparing 10,000 samples output by JABBERWOCK with 168 gathered WebAssembly samples, we believe that the generated samples by JABBERWOCK are similar to those in the real world. We then show that JABBERWOCK can provide malicious website detection with 99\% F1-score because JABBERWOCK makes a gap between benign and malicious samples as the reason for the above high score. We also confirm that JABBERWOCK can be combined with an existing malicious website detection tool to improve F1-scores. JABBERWOCK is publicly available via GitHub (https://github.com/c-chocolate/Jabberwock).