Generating simplified regular expression signatures for polymorphic worms

Yong Tang, Xicheng Lu, Bin Xiao

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

9 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

It is crucial to automatically generate accurate and effective signatures to defense against polymorphic worms. Previous work using conjunctions of tokens or token subsequence could lose some important information, like ignoring 1 byte token and neglecting the distances in the sequential tokens. In this paper we propose the Simplified Regular Expression (SRE) signature, and present its signature generation method based on the multiple sequence alignment algorithm. The multiple sequence alignment algorithm is extended from the pairwise sequence alignment algorithm, which encourages the contiguous substring extraction and is able to support wildcard string alignment and to preserve the distance of invariant content segment in generated SRE signatures. Thus, the generated SRE signature can express distance information for invariant content in polymorphic worms, which in turn makes even 1 byte invariant content extracted from polymorphic worms become valuable. Experiments on several types of polymorphic worms show that, compared with signatures generated by current network-based signature generation systems (NSGs), the generated SRE signatures are more accurate and precise to match polymorphic worms.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAutonomic and Trusted Computing - 4th International Conference, ATC 2007, Proceedings
Pages478-488
Number of pages11
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2007
Event4th International Conference on Autonomic and Trusted Computing: Bringing Safe, Self-x and Organic Computing Systems into Reality, ATC 2007 - Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Duration: 11 Jul 200713 Jul 2011

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume4610 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference4th International Conference on Autonomic and Trusted Computing: Bringing Safe, Self-x and Organic Computing Systems into Reality, ATC 2007
Country/TerritoryHong Kong
CityHong Kong
Period11/07/0713/07/11

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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