Content area

Abstract

Advanced malware attacks often employed sophisticated tactics such as DLL injection, script-based attacks, and the exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities. As evidenced by the recent high-profile cyber attacks, these techniques have enabled attackers to infiltrate computer systems that were thought to be well-protected. Thus, there is an urgent need to enhance current malware defenses with advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques that can effectively detect in real-time the elusive traces of malware attacks concealed within the extensive realm of normal activities. This project introduces Graphite, a graph-based approach for real-time detection of advanced malware attacks based on the event data collected from Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). Graphite first abstracts various entities and their relationships embodied within system events into computation graphs, which are amenable to graph-based machine learning methods. As a computation graph can be gigantic, making real-time malware detection inefficient, we project the graph into smaller graphlets, which are then subsequently fed into our graph-based approach to detect malicious activities. We have also developed a multi-label classification approach using an ensemble of classifier chains to identify different malware types. Our experimental results show that Graphite achieves high classification accuracy in both offline and real-time malware detection.

Details

1010268
Business indexing term
Title
Graphite: Real-Time Graph-Based Detection of Malware Attacks on Windows Systems
Number of pages
84
Publication year
2025
Degree date
2025
School code
0792
Source
DAI-B 87/2(E), Dissertation Abstracts International
ISBN
9798290966908
Advisor
Committee member
Yan, Guanhua; Prakash, Aravind; Xi, Zhaohan; Qiao, Xingye
University/institution
State University of New York at Binghamton
Department
Computer Science
University location
United States -- New York
Degree
Ph.D.
Source type
Dissertation or Thesis
Language
English
Document type
Dissertation/Thesis
Dissertation/thesis number
32168907
ProQuest document ID
3240567157
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/graphite-real-time-graph-based-detection-malware/docview/3240567157/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
Database copyright ProQuest LLC; ProQuest does not claim copyright in the individual underlying works.
Database
ProQuest One Academic