Abstract. We present an architecture for detecting "zero-day" worms and viruses in incoming email. Our main idea is to intercept every incoming message, prescan it for potentially dangerous attachments, and only deliver messages that are deemed safe. Unlike traditional scanning techniques that rely on some form of pattern matching (signatures), we use behavior-based anomaly detection. Under our approach, we "open" all suspicious attachments inside an instrumented virtual machine looking for dangerous actions, such as writing to the Windows registry, and flag suspicious messages. The attachment processing can be offloaded to a cluster of ancillary machines (as many as are needed to keep up with a site's email load), thus not imposing any computational load on the mail server. Messages flagged are put in a "quarantine" area for further, more labor-intensive processing. Our implementation shows that we can use a large number of malwarechecking VMs operating in parallel to cope with high loads. Finally, we show that we are able to detect the actions of all malicious software we tested, while keeping the false positive rate to under 5%.
Sidiroglou et al. REF propose an architecture to detect zero-day worms and viruses, which intercepts and scans every email for dangerous attachments.
An Email Worm Vaccine Architecture
ISPEC
Computer Science