Countering Malware Via Decoy Processes with Improved Resource Utilization Consistency

Abstract

The concept of a decoy process is a new development of defensive deception beyond traditional honeypots. Decoy processes can be exceptionally effective in detecting malware, directly upon contact or by redirecting malware to decoy I/O. A key requirement is that they resemble their real counterparts very closely to withstand adversarial probes by threat actors. To be usable, decoy processes need to consume only a small fraction of the resources consumed by their real counterparts. Our contribution in this paper is twofold. We attack the resource utilization consistency of decoy processes provided by a neural network with a heatmap training mechanism, which we find to be insufficiently trained. We then devise machine learning over control flow graphs that improves the heatmap training mechanism. A neural network retrained by our work shows higher accuracy and defeats our attacks without a significant increase in its own resource utilization.