Online Archive of University of Virginia Scholarship
Stealthy Server-Side Attacks Using Benign Websites and a Fail-Free Dynamic State Machine149 views
Author
Lee, Bora, Computer Science - School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia0000-0002-5241-9167
Advisors
Kwon, Yonghwi, EN-Comp Science Dept, University of Virginia
Abstract
The presence of server-side malware poses a significant risk to a large number of clients who access the compromised server. In this research, we propose a Stealthy-Attack on the server-side that can withstand forensic analysis such as reverse-engineering. Our attack can be triggered by ordinary contents from legitimate and benign websites to avoid detection and misdirect investigators. To expand the input-output space and make reverse-engineering challenging, our attack uses a specialized state-machine that accepts any inputs and produces output accordingly. We created a prototype of Stealthy-Attack and conducted an empirical evaluation on the attack, which demonstrates that it poses significant obstacles to forensic analysis.
Degree
MS (Master of Science)
Keywords
server-side malware, malware analysis, dynamic state machine
Lee, Bora. Stealthy Server-Side Attacks Using Benign Websites and a Fail-Free Dynamic State Machine. University of Virginia, Computer Science - School of Engineering and Applied Science, MS (Master of Science), 2023-04-24, https://doi.org/10.18130/wsf0-za45.