PolyDoc: Surveying PDF Files from the PolySwarm network

Complex data formats implicitly demand complex logic to parse and apprehend them. The Portable Document Format (PDF) is among the most demanding formats because it is used as both a data exchange and presentation format, and it has a particularly stringent tradition of supporting in-teroperability and consistent presentation. These requirements create complexity that presents an opportunity for adversaries to encode a variety of exploits and attacks. To investigate whether there is an association between structural malforms and malice (using PDF files as the example challenge format), we built PolyDoc, a tool that conducts format-aware tracing of files pulled from the PolySwarm network. The PolySwarm network crowdsources threat intelligence by running files through several industry-scale threat-detection engines. The PolySwarm network provides a PolyScore, which indicates whether a file is safe or malicious, as judged by threat-detection engines. We ran PolyDoc in a live hunt mode to gather PDF files submitted to PolySwarm and then trace the execution of these PDF files through popular PDF tools such as Mutool, Poppler, and Caradoc. We collected and analyzed 58,906 files from PolySwarm. Further, we used the PDF Error Ontology to assign error categories based on tracer output and compared them to the PolyScore. Our work demonstrates three core insights. First, PDF files classified as malicious contain syntactic malformations. Second, “uncategorized” error ontology classes were common across our different PDF tools—demonstrating that the PDF Error Ontology may be underspecified for files that real-world threat engines receive. Finally, attackers leverage specific syntactic malformations in attacks: malformations that current PDF tools can detect.