HEMC: a dynamic behaviour analysis system for malware based on hardware virtualisation.

Since many malwares disguise themselves by encrypting, obfuscating and recompiling, it is not easy for static analysis methods to recognise new or unknown malwares. This paper proposes a novel dynamic analysis technology based on hardware virtualisation to analyse more malwares with lower computational resources. Firstly, it intercepts the system-call functions to achieve on-demand behaviour analysis by setting special permissions in their physical addresses, which can be dynamically acquired when system-call functions are loaded into memory, as well as only monitoring high-risk functions, which take a small part of the whole functions. Then, this paper utilises copy-on-write technique and incremental image capability to reduce hard drive consumption and hard disk replication time. Finally, this paper proposes a novel approach to capture the return value of system-call functions to deeply analyse the poisoned results of malware samples. Meanwhile, a prototype system, called HEMC , is implemented based on QEMU / KVM . The experiments demonstrate that proposed methods outperform existing methods in efficiency and performance on malware dynamic analysis.