An Obfuscation-Neglect Android Malware Scoring System
Quark-Engine is also bundled with Kali Linux, BlackArch. :shipit: A trust-worthy, practical tool that's ready to boost up your malware reverse engineering. https://twitter.com/quarkengine
Android malware analysis engine is not a new story. Every antivirus company has their own secrets to build it. With curiosity, we develop a malware scoring system from the perspective of Taiwan Criminal Law in an easy but solid way.
We have an order theory of criminal which explains stages of committing a crime. For example, crime of murder consists of five stages, they are determined, conspiracy, preparation, start and practice. The latter the stage the more we’re sure that the crime is practiced.
According to the above principle, we developed our order theory of android malware. We developed five stages to see if the malicious activity is being practiced. They are 1. Permission requested. 2. Native API call. 3. Certain combination of native API. 4. Calling sequence of native API. 5. APIs that handle the same register. We not only define malicious activities and their stages but also develop weights and thresholds for calculating the threat level of a malware.
Malware evolved with new techniques to gain difficulties for reverse engineering. Obfuscation is one of the most commonly used techniques. In this talk, we present a Dalvik bytecode loader with the order theory of android malware to neglect certain cases of obfuscation.
Our Dalvik bytecode loader consists of functionalities such as 1. Finding cross reference and calling sequence of the native API. 2. Tracing the bytecode register. The combination of these functionalities (yes, the order theory) not only can neglect obfuscation but also match perfectly to the design of our malware scoring system.
Quark is very easy to use and also provides flexible output formats. There are 5 types of output reports: detail report, call graph, rules classification, summary report, and label-based report. Please see below for more details.
This is how we examine a real android malware (candy corn) with one single rule (crime).
$ quark -a 14d9f1a92dd984d6040cc41ed06e273e.apk -dand the report will look like:
You can add the -g option to the quark command, and you can
get the call graph (only those rules match with 100% confidence)
quark -a Ahmyth.apk -s -g
You can add the -c option to the quark command, and you can
output the rules classification with the mutual parent function (only those rules match with 100% confidence).
quark -a Ahmyth.apk -s -c
Examine with rules.
quark -a 14d9f1a92dd984d6040cc41ed06e273e.apk -s
Check which topic (indicated by labels) of the malware is more aggressive.
quark -a Ahmyth.apk -l detailed
- Python 3.7+
- git
- graphviz
$ pip install -U quark-engineGet the latest quark rules from our quark-rules repo
Now you can download the quark-rules to your home directory with a simple command.
$ freshquarkCheck --help to see the detailed usage description.
$ quark --helpYou may refer to the Quark Engine Document for more details of testing and development information.
Quark-Engine has been participating in the GSoC under the Honeynet Project!
- 2021: Join us! Projects available
Stay tuned for the upcoming GSoC! Join the Honeynet Slack chat for more info.
- We love battle fields. We embrace uncertainties. We challenge impossibles. We rethink everything. We change the way people think. And the most important of all, we benefit ourselves by benefit others first.