SoK: Essential Guide for Malware Sandbox Usage in Security Applications
Khái niệm cốt lõi
Malware sandboxes are essential for security applications, but their complexity can impact results significantly. Systematizing sandbox practices and guidelines can improve the effectiveness of sandbox deployments.
Tóm tắt
The content discusses the challenges and benefits of using malware sandboxes in security applications. It provides a systematic analysis of 84 papers on x86/64 malware sandboxes, proposing a framework to simplify sandbox components and derive practical guidelines. The evaluation shows significant improvements in sandbox observable activities and accuracy when applying the proposed guidelines.
Introduction:
Malware sandbox systems are crucial tools in security applications.
Correctly using sandboxes is challenging due to various implementation choices.
Dynamic analysis techniques impact sandbox analysis results.
Framework and Methodology:
Overview of malware sandbox components: implementations, monitoring techniques, analysis parameters.
Different types of sandbox implementations: emulation, virtualization, bare-metal.
Monitoring techniques include inside-guest user-space/kernel-space and outside-guest online/offline monitoring.
Categories of Sandbox Usage:
Categorizes use into detection, observational, anti-analysis papers.
Detection papers focus on identifying malicious binaries through behavior monitoring.
Observational papers analyze known malicious files with varying dataset sizes.
Sandbox Applications and Usage:
Detection papers prioritize isolation, extensibility over hardware transparency.
Observational studies favor emulated/virtualized sandboxes for scalability.
Monitoring Techniques:
Detection papers commonly use inside-guest monitoring for behavior context.
Outside-guest online monitoring is popular for collecting network artifacts.
Analysis Parameters:
Custom input and environment customization play a role in triggering malware behavior.
Multiple analyses help identify divergence in behavior under different environments.
Guidelines derived from practices:
Customize input to simulate user activities or network traffic effectively.
Tailor environment settings to trigger specific malware behaviors accurately.
Conduct multiple analyses to observe variations in malware behavior across different environments.
"Even with a well-configured sandbox, problems with failed execution, anti-analysis, and missing dependencies are not uncommon."
"There is no 'silver bullet' practice for sandbox deployments."