FMDiv: Functional Module Division on Binary Malware for Accurate Malicious Code Localization

In recent years, binary malware detection has attracted extensive attention from industry and academia. However, most of the existing work focuses on determining whether a sample is malicious or not, rather than identifying the malicious essence in malware. Few studies aim at locating malicious code at function granularity and suffer from inaccuracy. In this paper, we solve the problem by dividing malware into Functional Module (FM), which is a better granularity for locating malicious code, as it combines certain functions to express malicious behaviors in malware. We design a tool called FMDiv to automatically unpack and disassemble binary malware and then divide them into FMs based on the function call graph (CG). Meanwhile, one novel feature extraction and embedding method has been adopted to validate the effect of the FM division algorithm and provide one alternative method of characterization for subsequent malicious FM location. We evaluate FMDiv’s performance on 10,440 real-world samples from VIRUSSHARE. The results show that FMDiv can correctly characterize and make FM division of malware, outperforming current state-of-the-art work.