Malicious PDF detection using metadata and structural features

Abstract

Owed to their versatile functionality and widespread adoption, PDF documents have become a popular avenue for user exploitation ranging from large-scale phishing attacks to targeted attacks. In this paper, we present a framework for robust detection of malicious documents through machine learning. Our approach is based on features extracted from document metadata and structure. Using real-world datasets, we demonstrate the the adequacy of these document properties for malware detection and the durability of these features across new malware variants. Our analysis shows that the Random Forests classification method, an ensemble classifier that randomly selects features for each individual classification tree, yields the best detection rates, even on previously unseen malware. Indeed, using multiple datasets containing an aggregate of over 5,000 unique malicious documents and over 100,000 benign ones, our classification rates remain well above 99% while maintaining low false positives of 0.2% or less for different classification parameters and experimental scenarios. Moreover, the classifier has the ability to detect documents crafted for targeted attacks and separate them from broadly distributed malicious PDF documents. Remarkably, we also discovered that by artificially reducing the influence of the top features in the classifier, we can still achieve a high rate of detection in an adversarial setting where the attacker is aware of both the top features utilized in the classifier and our normality model. Thus, the classifier is resilient against mimicry attacks even with knowledge of the document features, classification method, and training set.