Malware and Formal Methods: Rigorous Approaches for detecting Malicious Behaviour

The crucial aim of software security is malware detection. A malware is a program with malicious intents. The predominate anti-malware solutions are signature-based. These detectors compute the signature starting from the syntactic characteristics of the malicious code. Unfortunately, the signature-based techniques are ineffective against the code obfuscations, i.e., trivial transformations that alter the syntax of the code preserving the normal behaviour of the program. To address this limitation, formal methods are used in software security. Formal methods are rigorous techniques used to verify the behaviour of a system. This paper aims to make an overview on behavioural based techniques developed to detect malware programs. The illustrated approaches are based on different formal techniques.