On the Detection of Exploitation of Vulnerabilities Leading to the Execution of a Malicious Code

Abstract

Software protection from exploitation of possible unknown vulnerabilities can be performed both by searching (for example, using symbolic execution) and subsequent elimination of the vulnerabilities and by using detection and / or intrusion prevention systems. In the latter case, this problem is usually solved by forming a profile of a normal behavior and deviation from normal behavior over a predetermined threshold is regarded as an anomaly or an attack. In this paper, the task is to protect a given software P from exploiting unknown vulnerabilities. For this aim a method is proposed for constructing a profile of the normal execution of the program P, in which, in addition to a set of legal chains of system and library functions, it is proposed to take into account the distances between adjacent function calls. At the same time, a profile is formed for each program. It is assumed that taking into account the distances between function calls will reveal shell code execution using system and / or library function calls. An algorithm and a system for detecting abnormal code execution are proposed. The work carried out experiments in the case when P is the FireFox browser. During the experiments the possibility of applying the developed algorithm to identify abnormal behavior when launching publicly available exploits was investigated.

Keywords

• system calls
• library calls
• software vulnerability