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k-NN Classification of Malware in HTTPS Traffic Using the Metric Space Approach

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9650))

Abstract

In this paper, we present detection of malware in HTTPS traffic using k-NN classification. We focus on the metric space approach for approximate k-NN searches over dataset of sparse high-dimensional descriptors of network traffic. We show the classification based on approximate k-NN search using metric index exhibits false positive rate reduced by an order of magnitude when compared to the state of the art method, while keeping the classification fast enough.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In our case, the descriptors are high-dimensional sparse vectors representing network traffic and the distance function is the Euclidean distance.

  2. 2.

    The exact cannot be published due to non-disclosure agreements.

  3. 3.

    Specifically, the hash was considered to be malicious if the corresponding process was detected by at least 20 anti-viruses used by virustotal.com service.

  4. 4.

    virustotal.com.

  5. 5.

    \(r_{\mathrm {up}}\) is the number of bytes sent from the client to the server, \(r_{\mathrm {down}}\) is the number of bytes received by the client from the server, \(r_{\mathrm {td}}\) is the duration of the connection (in milliseconds), and \(r_{\mathrm {ti}}\) is the time in seconds elapsed between start of the current and previous request of the same client.

  6. 6.

    The experiments have run on 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard with Intel Xeon CPU X5660, 2.8 GHz, 12 cores supporting hyper-threading. The training of the ECM classifier has run on a virtual machine (VMWare) using 8 cores CPU 2.2 GHz and 132 GB RAM. Matlab library MinFunc has been used.

  7. 7.

    For a given query, the approximation error is computed as a normed overlap distance between the query result returned by approximate k-NN search and the correct result returned by exact k-NN search.

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Acknowledgments

This research has been supported by Czech Science Foundation project (GAČR) 15-08916S.

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Correspondence to Přemysl Čech .

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Lokoč, J., Kohout, J., Čech, P., Skopal, T., Pevný, T. (2016). k-NN Classification of Malware in HTTPS Traffic Using the Metric Space Approach. In: Chau, M., Wang, G., Chen, H. (eds) Intelligence and Security Informatics. PAISI 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9650. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31863-9_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31863-9_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-31863-9

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