Hunting Trojan Horses

Abstract

HTH (Hunting Trojan Horses) is a security framework developed for detecting difficult types of intrusions. HTH is intended as a complement to anti-virus software in that it targets unknown and zero-day Trojan Horses and Backdoors. In order to accurately identify these types of attacks HTH utilizes runtime information available during execution. The information collected includes fine-grained information flow, program execution flow and resources used.In this paper we present Harrier, an Application Security Monitor at the heart of our HTH framework. Harrier is an efficient run-time monitor that dynamically collects execution-related data. Harrier is capable of collecting information across different abstraction levels including architectural, system and library APIs. To date, Harrier is 3-4 times faster than comparable information flow tracking systems.Using the collected information, Harrier allows for accurate identification of abnormal program behavior. Preliminary results show a good detection rate with a low rate of false positives. Copyright 2006 ACM.