Risk Analysis Commons^™

Static Malware Family Clustering Via Structural And Functional Characteristics, David George, Andre Mauldin, Josh Mitchell, Sufiyan Mohammed, Robert Slater

SMU Data Science Review

Static and dynamic analyses are the two primary approaches to analyzing malicious applications. The primary distinction between the two is that the application is analyzed without execution in static analysis, whereas the dynamic approach executes the malware and records the behavior exhibited during execution. Although each approach has advantages and disadvantages, dynamic analysis has been more widely accepted and utilized by the research community whereas static analysis has not seen the same attention. This study aims to apply advancements in static analysis techniques to demonstrate the identification of fine-grained functionality, and show, through clustering, how malicious applications may be grouped …