SPiKE: engineering malware analysis tools using unobtrusive binary-instrumentation

Malware -- a generic term that encompasses viruses, trojans, spywares and other intrusive code -- is widespread today. Malware analysis is a multi-step process providing insight into malware structure and functionality, facilitating the development of an antidote. Behavior monitoring, an important step in the analysis process, is used to observe malware interaction with respect to the system and is achieved by employing dynamic coarse-grained binary-instrumentation on the target system. However, current research involving dynamic binary-instrumentation, categorized into probe-based and just-in-time compilation (JIT), fail in the context of malware. Probe-based schemes are not transparent. Most if not all malware are sensitive to code modification incorporating methods to prevent their analysis and even instrument the system themselves for their functionality and stealthness. Current JIT schemes, though transparent, do not support multithreading, self-modifying and/or self-checking (SM-SC) code and are unable to capture code running in kernel-mode. Also, they are an overkill in terms of latency for coarse-grained instrumentation.To address this problem, we have developed a new dynamic coarse-grained binary-instrumentation framework codenamed SPiKE, that aids in the construction of powerful malware analysis tools to combat malware that are becoming increasingly hard to analyze. Our goal is to provide a binary-instrumentation framework that is unobtrusive, portable, efficient, easy-to-use and reusable, supporting multithreading and SM-SC code, both in user- and kernel-mode. In this paper, we discuss the concept of unobtrusive binary-instrumentation and present the design, implementation and evaluation of SPiKE. We also illustrate the framework utility by describing our experience with a tool employing SPiKE to analyze a real world malware.