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AIS RESEARCH

Fast Model Learning for the Detection of Malicious Digital Documents

Challenge

Modern cyber-attacks are often conducted by distributing digital documents that contain malware.

AIS employees’ approach, which consists of a classifier that uses features derived from dynamic analysis of a document viewer as it renders the document in question, can classify the disposition of digital documents with greater than 98 percent accuracy even when its model is trained on just small amounts of data. To keep the classification model itself small and thereby to provide scalability, they employ an entity resolution strategy that merges syntactically disparate features that are thought to be semantically equivalent but vary due to programmatic randomness. Entity resolution enables construction of a comprehensive model of benign functionality using relatively few training documents, and the model does not improve significantly with additional training data.

Key Insights:

  • Developed a classifier for the disposition of digital documents that only requires training on a very small data set of benign documents and which only retains a very small set of exemplar features
  • This approach has been shown to attain 98% accuracy in classifying PDFs as either malicious or benign
  • This classification approach entails so few comparisons that it can easily be performed in an online fashion. The proposed strategy is suitable for use in conjunction with any sandboxing or detonation chamber-based technologies that provide for the tracing of system calls

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