Hamsa: Fast Signature Generation for Zero-day

Polymorphic Wormswith Provable Attack Resilience

Zhichun Li, Manan Sanghi, Yan Chen, Ming-Yang Kao and Brian Chavez

Lab for Internet & Security Technology (LIST)Northwestern University

2

The Spread of Sapphire/Slammer Worms

3

Desired Requirements for Polymorphic Worm Signature

Generation•Network-based signature generation

–Worms spread in exponential speed, to detect them in their early stage is very crucial… However

»At their early stage there are limited worm samples.

–The high speed network router may see more worm samples… But

»Need to keep up with the network speed !»Only can use network level information

4

Desired Requirements for Polymorphic Worm Signature

Generation

No existing work satisfies these requirements !

•Noise tolerant–Most network flow classifiers suffer false

positives.–Even host based approaches can be injected

with noise.

•Attack resilience–Attackers always try to evade the detection

systems

•Efficient signature matching for high-speed links

5

Outline

•Motivation•Hamsa Design•Model-based Signature Generation•Evaluation•Related Work•Conclusion

6

Choice of Signatures

•Two classes of signatures–Content based

»Token: a substring with reasonable coverage to the suspicious traffic

»Signatures: conjunction of tokens

–Behavior based

•Our choice: content based–Fast signature matching. ASIC based

approach can archive 6 ~ 8Gb/s–Generic, independent of any protocol or

server

7

Unique Invariants of Worms

• Protocol Frame– The code path to the vulnerability part, usually

infrequently used– Code-Red II: ‘.ida?’ or ‘.idq?’

• Control Data: leading to control flow hijacking– Hard coded value to overwrite a jump target or a

function call

• Worm Executable Payload– CLET polymorphic engine: ‘0\x8b’, ‘\xff\xff\xff’ and

‘t\x07\xeb’

• Possible to have worms with no such invariants, but very hard

Invariants

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Hamsa ArchitectureProtocolClassifier

UDP1434

HamsaSignatureGenerator

WormFlow

Classifier

TCP137

. . .TCP80

TCP53

TCP25

NormalTraffic Pool

SuspiciousTraffic Pool

Signatures

NetworkTap

KnownWormFilter

Normal traffic reservoir

Real time

Policy driven

9

Hamsa Design•Key idea: model the uniqueness of worm

invariants–Greedy algorithm for finding token

conjunction signatures

•Highly accurate while much faster–Both analytically and experimentally –Compared with the latest work, polygraph–Suffix array based token extraction

•Provable attack resilience guarantee•Noise tolerant

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Hamsa Signature Generator

• Core part: Model-based Greedy Signature Generation

• Iterative approach for multiple worms

TokenExtractor Tokens

FilterPool sizetoo small?

NO

SuspiciousTraffic Pool

NormalTraffic Pool

YES

Quit

SignatureRefiner

SignatureTokenIdentification

Core

11

Outline

•Motivation•Hamsa Design•Model-based Signature Generation•Evaluation•Related Work•Conclusion

12

Problem Formulation

SignatureGenerator Signature

false positive bound

Maximize the coverage in the suspicious pool

False positive in the normal pool is bounded by

Suspicious pool

Normal pool

With noise NP-Hard!

13

Model Uniqueness of Invariants

FP21%

9%

17%

5%

t1

Joint FP with t1

2%

0.5%

1%

t2

The total number of tokens bounded by k*

U(1)=upper bound of FP(t1) U(2)=upper bound of FP(t1,t2)

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Signature Generation Algorithm

(82%, 50%)

(COV, FP)

(70%, 11%)

(67%, 30%)

(62%, 15%)

(50%, 25%)

(41%, 55%)

(36%, 41%)

(12%, 9%)

u(1)=15%Suspicious pool tokens

token extraction

Order by coverage

t1

15

(82%, 50%)

(COV, FP)

(70%, 11%)

(67%, 30%)

(62%, 15%)

(50%, 25%)

(41%, 55%)

(36%, 41%)

(12%, 9%)

t1

Order by joint coverage with t1

(69%, 9.8%)

(COV, FP)

(68%, 8.5%)

(67%, 1%)

(40%, 2.5%)

(35%, 12%)

(31%, 9%)

(10%, 0.5%)

u(2)=7.5%t2

Signature

Signature Generation Algorithm

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Algorithm Analysis•Runtime analysis O(T*(|M|+|N|))•Provable Attack Resilience Guarantee

–Analytically bound the worst attackers can do!

–Example: K*=5, u(1)=0.2, u(2)=0.08, u(3)=0.04, u(4)=0.02, u(5)=0.01 and =0.01

–The better the flow classifier, the lower are the false negatives

Noise ratio FP upper bound

FN upper bound

5% 1% 1.84%

10% 1% 3.89%

20% 1% 8.75%

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Attack Resilience Assumptions

• Two Common assumptions for any sig generation sys

• Two Unique assumptions for token-based schemes

• Attacks to the flow classifier– Our approach does not depend on perfect

flow classifiers– With 99% noise, no approach can work!– High noise injection makes the worm

propagate less efficiently.• Enhance flow classifiers

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Improvements to the Basic Approach

• Generalizing Signature Generation – use scoring function to evaluate the

goodness of signature

• Iteratively use single worm detector to detect multiple worms

– At the first iteration, the algorithm find the signature for the most popular worms in the suspicious pool.

– All other worms and normal traffic treat as noise.

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Outline

• Motivation• Hamsa Design• Model-based Signature Generation• Evaluation• Related Work• Conclusion

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Experiment Methodology

• Experiential setup:– Suspicious pool:

» Three pseudo polymorphic worms based on real exploits (Code-Red II, Apache-Knacker and ATPhttpd),

» Two polymorphic engines from Internet (CLET and TAPiON).

– Normal pool: 2 hour departmental http trace (326MB)

• Signature evaluation:– False negative: 5000 generated worm samples

per worm– False positive:

» 4-day departmental http trace (12.6 GB)» 3.7GB web crawling including .mp3, .rm, .ppt, .pdf, .swf

etc.» /usr/bin of Linux Fedora Core 4

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Results on Signature Quality

• Single worm with noise– Suspicious pool size: 100 and 200 samples– Noise ratio: 0%, 10%, 30%, 50%, 70%– Noise samples randomly picked from the normal pool– Always get above signatures and accuracy.

• Multiple worms with noises give similar results

WormsTraining

FNTraining

FPEvaluation

FNEvaluatio

nFP

Binaryevaluation

FP

Signature

Code-Red II 0 0 0 0 0

{'.ida?': 1, '%u780': 1, ' HTTP/1.0\r\n': 1, 'GET /': 1, '%u': 2}

CLET 0 0.109% 0 0.06236% 0.268%

{'0\x8b': 1, '\xff\xff\xff': 1,'t\x07\xeb': 1}

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Speed Results• Implementation with C++/Python

– 500 samples with 20% noise, 100MB normal traffic pool, 15 seconds on an XEON 2.8Ghz, 112MB memory consumption

• Speed comparison with Polygraph– Asymptotic runtime: O(T) vs. O(|M|2), when |M|

increase, T won’t increase as fast as |M|!– Experimental: 64 to 361 times faster (polygraph

vs. ours, both in python)

0

1000

2000

3000

100 200 300 400

pool size

the

nu

mb

er

of

tok

en

s

20% noise

30% noise40% noise

50% noise

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Outline

• Motivation• Hamsa Design• Model-based Signature Generation• Evaluation• Related Work• Conclusion

24

Related worksHamsa Polygrap

hCFG PADS Nemea

nCOVERS Malware

Detection

Network or host based

Network

Network Network

Host Host Host Host

Content or behavior based

Contentbased

Contentbased

Behaviorbased

Contentbased

Contentbased

Behavior based

Behaviorbased

Noise tolerance

Yes Yes (slow)

Yes No No Yes Yes

Multi worms in one protocol

Yes Yes (slow)

Yes No Yes Yes Yes

On-line sig matching

Fast Fast Slow Fast Fast Fast Slow

Generality Generalpurpose

Generalpurpose

Generalpurpose

Generalpurpose

Protocolspecific

Serverspecific

Generalpurpose

Provable atk resilience

Yes No No No No No No

Information exploited

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Conclusion• Network based signature generation

and matching are important and challenging

• Hamsa: automated signature generation

– Fast– Noise tolerant– Provable attack resilience– Capable of detecting multiple worms in a

single application protocol

• Proposed a model to describe the worm invariants

Questions ?

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Experiment: Sample requirement

• Coincidental-pattern attack [Polygraph]• Results

– For the three pseudo worms, 10 samples can get good results.

– CLET and TAPiON at least need 50 samples

• Conclusion– For better signatures, to be conservative, at

least need 100+ samplesRequire scalable and fast signature generation!

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Experiment: U-bound evaluation

• To be conservative we chose k*=15.– Even we assume every token has 70% false

positive, their conjunction still only have 0.5% false positive. In practice, very few tokens exceed 70% false positive.

• Define u(1) and ur, generate– We tested:u(1) = [0.02, 0.04, 0.06, 0.08, 0.10,

0.20, 0.30, 0.40, 0.5] and ur = [0.20, 0.40, 0.60, 0.8]. The minimum (u(1), ur) works for all our worms was (0.08,0.20)

– In practice, we use conservative value (0.15,0.5)

1)1()( iruuiu

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Results on Signature Quality (II)

• Suspicious pool with high noise ratio:– For noise ratio 50% and 70%, sometimes we

can produce two signatures, one is the true worm signature, anther solely from noise.

– The false positive of these noise signatures have to be very small:

» Mean: 0.09%» Maximum: 0.7%

• Multiple worms with noises give similar results

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Attack Resilience Assumptions

• Common assumptions for any sig generation sys

1. The attacker cannot control which worm samples are encountered by Hamsa

2. The attacker cannot control which worm samples encountered will be classified as worm samples by the flow classifier

• Unique assumptions for token-based schemes1. The attacker cannot change the frequency of

tokens in normal traffic2. The attacker cannot control which normal

samples encountered are classified as worm samples by the worm flow classifier

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Normal Traffic Poisoning Attack

• We found our approach is not sensitive to the normal traffic pool used

• History: last 6 months time window• The attacker has to poison the normal

traffic 6 month ahead!• 6 month the vulnerability may have

been patched!• Poisoning the popular protocol is very

difficult.

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Red Herring Attack

•Hard to implement•Dynamic updating problem.

Again our approach is fast•Partial Signature matching, in

extended version.

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Coincidental Attack

•As mentioned in the Polygraph paper, increase the sample requirement

•Again, our approach are scalable and fast

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Model Uniqueness of Invariants•Let worm has a set of invariants:

Determine their order by:

t1: the token with minimum false positive in normal traffic. u(1) is the upper bound of the false positive of t1

t2: the token with minimum joint false positive with t1 FP({t1,t2}) bounded by u(2)

ti: the token with minimum joint false positive with {t1, t2, ti-1}. FP({t1,t2,…,ti}) bounded by u(i)

The total number of tokens bounded by k*

jtFPtFP j })({})({ 1

1 }),({}),({ 121 jttFPttFP j

1 }),,...,({}),...,({ 111 ijtttFPttFP jii

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Problem FormulationNoisy Token Multiset Signature Generation

Problem :

INPUT: Suspicious pool and normal traffic pool N; value <1.OUTPUT: A multi-set of tokens signature S={(t1, n1), . . . (tk, nk)} such that the signature can maximize the coverage in the suspicious pool and the false positive in normal pool should less than

•Without noise, exist polynomial time algo•With noise, NP-Hard

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Token-fit Attack Can Fail Polygraph

•Polygraph: hierarchical clustering to find signatures w/ smallest false positives

•With the token distribution of the noise in the suspicious pool, the attacker can make the worm samples more like noise traffic –Different worm samples encode different

noise tokens

•Our approach can still work!

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Token-fit attack could make Polygraph fail

Noise samplesN1 N2 N3

Worm samplesW1

W2 W3

MergeCandidate 1

MergeCandidate 2

MergeCandidate 3

CANNOT merge further!NO true signature found!

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Generalizing Signature Generation with noise

• BEST Signature = Balanced Signature– Balance the sensitivity with the specificity– But how? Create notation Scoring

function:score(cov, fp, …) to evaluate the goodness of signature

– Current used

» Intuition: it is better to reduce the coverage 1/a if the false positive becomes 10 times smaller.

» Add some weight to the length of signature (LEN) to break ties between the signatures with same coverage and false positive

LENCOVFPLENFPCOVscore )10),log((),,(

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Generalizing Signature Generation with noise

• Algorithm: similar

• Running time: same as previous simple form

• Attack Resilience Guarantee: similar

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Extension to multiple worm

• Iteratively use single worm detector to detect multiple worm

– At the first iteration, the algorithm find the signature for the most popular worms in the suspicious pool. All other worms and normal traffic treat as noise.

– Though the analysis for the single worm can apply to multiple worms, but the bound are not very promising. Reason: high noise ratio

41

Implementation details

• Token Extraction: extract a set of tokens with minimum length l and minimum coverage COVmin.

– Polygraph use suffix tree based approach: 20n space and time consuming.

– Our approach: Enhanced suffix array 8n space and much faster! (at least 20 times)

• Calculate false positive when check U-bounds

– Again suffix array based approach, but for a 300MB normal pool, 1.2GB suffix array still large!

– Optimization: using MMAP, memory usage: 150 ~ 250MB

42

Token Extraction

• Extract a set of tokens with minimum length lmin and coverage COVmin. And for each token output the frequency vector.

• Polygraph use suffix tree based approach: 20n space and time consuming.

• Our approach:– Enhanced suffix array 4n space– Much faster, at least 50(UPDATE) times!– Can apply to Polygraph also.

43

Calculate the false positive

• We need to have the false positive to check the U-bounds

• Again suffix array based approach, but for a 300MB normal pool, 1.2GB suffix array still large!

• Improvements– Caching– MMAP suffix array. True memory usage: 150

~ 250MB.– 2 level normal pool– Hardware based fast string matching– Compress normal pool and string matching

algorithms directly over compressed strings

44

Future works

•Enhance the flow classifiers–Cluster suspicious flows by return

messages–Malicious flow verification by

replaying to Address Space Randomization enabled servers.

45

Experiment: Attacks

• We propose a new attack: token-fit.– The attacker may study the noise inside the

suspicious pool

– Create worm sample Wi which may has more same tokens with some normal traffic noise sample Ni

– This will stuck the hierarchical clustering used in [Polygraph]

– BUT We still can generate correct signature!