IMDS: Intelligent Malware Detection System

The proliferation of malware has presented a serious threat to the security of computer systems. Traditional signature-based antivirus systems fail to detect polymorphic and new, previously unseen malicious executables. In this paper, resting on the analysis of Windows API execution sequences called by PE files, we develop the Intelligent Malware Detection System (IMDS) using Objective Oriented Association (OOA) mining based classification. IMDS is an integrated system consisting of three major modules: PE parser, OOA rule generator, and rule based classifier. An OOA Fast FPGrowth algorithm is adapted to efficiently generate OOA rules for classification. A comprehensive experimental study on a large collection of PE files obtained from the anti-virus laboratory of King Soft Corporation is performed to compare various malware detection approaches. Promising experimental results demonstrate that the accuracy and efficiency of our IMDS system outperform popular anti-virus software such as Norton AntiVirus and McAfee VirusScan, as well as previous data mining based detection systems which employed Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Decision Tree techniques.