BitShred: feature hashing malware for scalable triage and semantic analysis

Abstract

The sheer volume of new malware found each day is growing at an exponential pace. This growth has created a need for automatic malware triage techniques that determine what malware is similar, what malware is unique, and why. In this paper, we present BitShred, a system for large-scale malware similarity analysis and clustering, and for automatically uncovering semantic inter- and intra-family relationships within clusters. The key idea behind BitShred is using feature hashing to dramatically reduce the high-dimensional feature spaces that are common in malware analysis. Feature hashing also allows us to mine correlated features between malware families and samples using co-clustering techniques. Our evaluation shows that BitShred speeds up typical malware triage tasks by up to 2,365x and uses up to 82x less memory on a single CPU, all with comparable accuracy to previous approaches. We also develop a parallelized version of BitShred, and demonstrate scalability within the Hadoop framework.