Parent process termination: an adversarial technique for persistent malware

ABSTRACT

Persistent malware use techniques, such as obfuscation, process injection, and system call abuse to evade security mechanisms and avoid detection throughout their compromise. Malware analysis and memory forensics must have proper skill for fighting them. To show the limitation of current memory forensics, we introduce an adversarial technique to remove the forensics evidence required to identify malware, called parent process termination (PPT). PPT neither creates a new malware nor does it manipulate the features of a running process like malware obfuscation techniques, which abuse the parent–child relationship. In PPT, the malware process creates child processes for a malicious purpose and then terminates. This termination, letting the operating system (OS) reuses the parent process’s resources and thus erases all trace of it, while leaving its children to perform anomalous activities. To show PPT’s applicability in Windows OS, we run and analyze selected malware samples in a controlled environment. We implement PPT and show how this technique benefits from current memory forensics tools being unable to identify the exited processes. The forensics analysis proves behaviour of the PPT adversarial technique run in different malware executions. Our experiments show PPT successfully removes forensics evidence to identify the source of malicious activity. We hope these results can shed light on the future design of memory forensics tools and better-informed choices by users.

KEYWORDS:

• Malware analysis
• malware persistence
• memory forensics
• process termination

Acknowledgments

They would like to express their sincere gratitude to Evan R. Kennedy (Service New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada) for his helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge the funding from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) through the discovery grant [RGPIN 231074] and Canada Research Chair to Dr. Ghorbani.