Effective Analysis, Characterization, and Detection of Malicious Web Pages

Abstract

he steady evolution of the Web has paved the way for miscreants to take advantage of vulnerabilities to embed malicious content into web pages. Up on a visit, malicious web pages steal sensitive data, redirect victims to other malicious targets, or cease control of victim’s system to mount future attacks. Approaches to detect malicious web pages have been reactively effective at special classes of attacks like drive-by-downloads. However, the prevalence and complexity of attacks by malicious web pages is still worrisome. The main challenges in this problem domain are (1) fine-grained capturing and characterization of attack payloads (2) evolution of web page artifacts and (3) exibility and scalability of detection techniques with a fast-changing threat landscape. To this end, we proposed a holistic approach that leverages static analysis, dynamic analysis, machine learning, and evolutionary searching and optimization to effectively analyze and detect malicious web pages. We do so by: introducing novel features to capture fine-grained snapshot of malicious web pages, holistic characterization of malicious web pages, and application of evolutionary techniques to fine-tune learning-based detection models pertinent to evolution of attack payloads. In this paper, we present key intuition and details of our approach, results obtained so far, and future work.