Intelligent Behavior-Based Malware Detection System on Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

These days, cloud computing is one of the most promising technologies to store information and provide services online efficiently. Using this rapidly developing technology to protect computer-based systems from cyber-related attacks can bring many advantages over traditional protection schemes. The protected assets can be any computer-based systems such as cyber-physical systems (CPS), critical systems, desktop and laptop computers, mobile devices, and Internet of Things (IoT). Malicious software (malware) is any software which targets the computer-based system to launch cyber-attacks to threaten the integrity, confidentiality and availability of the data. To detect the massively growing malware attacks surface, we propose an intelligent behavior-based detection system in the cloud environment. The proposed system first creates a malware dataset on different virtual machines which identify distinctive features efficiently. Then, selected features are given to the learning-based and rule-based detection agents to separate malware from benign samples. Totally, 10,000 program samples have been analyzed to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The proposed system can detect both known and unknown malware efficiently with high detection and accuracy rate. Besides, the proposed method results have outperformed the leading methods’ results in the literature. Our evaluation results show that the proposed algorithms along with machine learning (ML) classifiers achieve 99.8% detection rate, 0.4% false positive rate, and 99.7% accuracy. Our proposed system and algorithms may assist those who would like to develop a novel malware detection system in the cloud environment.

Keywords

• Cloud computing
• virtualization
• malware detection
• behavioral detection
• rule-based detection