2010 Articles

BotSwindler: Tamper Resistant Injection of Believable Decoys in VM-Based Hosts for Crimeware Detection

Bowen, Brian M.; Prabhu, Pratap; Kemerlis, Vasileios; Sidiroglou, Stelios; Keromytis, Angelos D.; Stolfo, Salvatore

We introduce BotSwindler, a bait injection system designed to delude and detect crimeware by forcing it to reveal during the exploitation of monitored information. The implementation of BotSwindler relies upon an out-of-host software agent that drives user-like interactions in a virtual machine, seeking to convince malware residing within the guest OS that it has captured legitimate credentials. To aid in the accuracy and realism of the simulations, we propose a low overhead approach, called virtual machine verification, for verifying whether the guest OS is in one of a predefined set of states. We present results from experiments with real credential-collecting malware that demonstrate the injection of monitored financial bait for detecting compromises. Additionally, using a computational analysis and a user study, we illustrate the believability of the simulations and we demonstrate that they are sufficiently human-like. Finally, we provide results from performance measurements to show our approach does not impose a performance burden.