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http://dx.doi.org/10.13089/JKIISC.2019.29.6.1365

Detecting Meltdown and Spectre Malware through Binary Pattern Analysis  

Kim, Moon-sun (Hannam University)
Lee, Man-hee (Hannam University)
Abstract
Meltdown and Spectre are vulnerabilities that exploit out-of-order execution and speculative execution techniques to read memory regions that are not accessible with user privileges. OS patches were released to prevent this attack, but older systems without appropriate patches are still vulnerable. Currently, there are some research to detect Meltdown and Spectre attacks, but most of them proposed dynamic analysis methods. Therefore, this paper proposes a binary signature that can be used to detect Meltdown and Spectre malware without executing them. For this, we collected 13 malicious codes from GitHub and performed binary pattern analysis. Based on this, we proposed a static detection method for Meltdown and Spectre malware. Our results showed that the method identified all the 19 attack files with 0.94% false positive rate when applied to 2,317 normal files.
Keywords
Meltdown; Spectre; Binary Pattern Analysis; Malware Detection;
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Times Cited By KSCI : 1  (Citation Analysis)
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