Malware detection based on structural and behavioural features of API calls

In this paper, we propose a five-step approach to detect obfuscated malware by investigating the structural and behavioural features of API calls. We have developed a fully automated system to disassemble and extract API call features effectively from executables. Using n-gram statistical analysis of binary content, we are able to classify if an executable file is malicious or benign. Our experimental results with a dataset of 242 malwares and 72 benign files have shown a promising accuracy of 96.5% for the unigram model. We also provide a preliminary analysis by our approach using support vector machine (SVM) and by varying n-values from 1 to 5, we have analysed the performance that include accuracy, false positives and false negatives. By applying SVM, we propose to train the classifier and derive an optimum n-gram model for detecting both known and unknown malware efficiently.