VT Unveils Approach to Detect Malicious Software in Networked Computers and Data

June 4, 2014

BLACKSBURG, Va., June 4 — Cybercrime comes in all forms these days. One recent headline told of the creepware or silent computer snooping that resulted in the arrest of some 90 people in 19 countries. Miss Teen USA was among the victims. Her computer had been turned into a camera and used to spy on her in her own bedroom.

On the commercial front, Target suffered the largest retail hack in U.S. history during the Christmas shopping season of 2013, and now the Fortune 500 company’s outlook is bleak with steep drops in profits.

New research to be announced at the June 2014 ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security in Kyoto, Japan, has unveiled the causal relations among computer network events.

The work effectively isolates infected computer hosts and detects in advance stealthy malware also known as malicious software.

The work was conducted under the auspices of a 2010 National Science Foundation CAREER Award grant to develop software that differentiates human-user computer interaction from malware. That $530,000 award was presented to Danfeng “Daphne” Yao, associate professor of computer science at Virginia Tech. She worked with Naren Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering, and her graduate student Hao Zhang of Beijing, China, a doctoral candidate in computer science.

The Virginia Tech computer scientists used causal relations to determine whether or not network activities have justifiable and legitimate causes to occur.

“This type of semantic reasoning is new and very powerful,” Yao said.

“The true significance of this security approach is its potential proactive defense capability. Conventional security systems scan for known attack patterns, which is reactive. Our anomaly detection based on enforcing benign properties in network traffic is a clear departure from that,” Yao added.

They will present their paper “Detection of Stealthy Malware Activities with Traffic Causality and Scalable Triggering Relation Discovery” on June 4.  It will be published in the symposium’s proceedings.

Virginia Tech Intellectual Property has filed a patent on this technology, and it is actually a continuation-in-part patent, following one of Yao’s earlier patents.

Previously, Yao garnered a 3-year, $450,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research on cyber security to quantitatively detect anomalies in Department of Defense computers, mobile devices, command and control servers, and embedded systems deployed on U.S. Navy ships.

Yao’s career research focus has been on this methodology development for novel, practical, and quantitative anomaly detection. Specifically, she is analyzing causal relations of events and producing instructions for detecting anomalies in computer programs, systems, and networks.

About the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech

The College of Engineering (http://www.eng.vt.edu/) at Virginia Tech is internationally recognized for its excellence in 14 engineering disciplines and computer science. The college’s 6,000 undergraduates benefit from an innovative curriculum that provides a “hands-on, minds-on” approach to engineering education, complementing classroom instruction with two unique design-and-build facilities and a strong Cooperative Education Program. With more than 50 research centers and numerous laboratories, the college offers its 2,000 graduate students opportunities in advanced fields of study such as biomedical engineering, state-of-the-art microelectronics, and nanotechnology. Virginia Tech, the most comprehensive university in Virginia, is dedicated to quality, innovation, and results to the commonwealth, the nation, and the world.

Source: Virginia Tech

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

High-Performance Storage for AI and Analytics Panel

October 31, 2024

When storage is mentioned in an AI or Big Data analytics context, it is assumed to be a high-performance system. In practice, it may not be, and the user eventually learns about scaleable storage as the amounts of data g Read more…

White House Mulls Expanding AI Chip Export Bans Beyond China

October 31, 2024

The Biden administration is reportedly considering capping sales of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips from US-based manufacturers like AMD and Nvidia to certain countries, including those in the Middle East. � Read more…

Lottery to Determine Major AI Conference Attendees Amid Registration Boom

October 31, 2024

A boom in AI has created a problem for the organizers of the NeurIPS conference, which is considered an essential machine-learning research conference. The sheer number of registrations has overwhelmed organizers, who Read more…

Role Reversal: Google Teases Nvidia’s Blackwell as It Softens TPU Rivalry

October 30, 2024

Customers now have access to Google's homegrown hardware -- its Axion CPU and latest Trillium TPU -- in its Cloud service.  At the same time, Google gave customers a teaser on Nvidia's Blackwell coming to Google Cloud, Read more…

AI Has a Data Problem, Appen Report Says

October 30, 2024

AI may be a priority at American companies, but the difficulty in managing data and obtaining high quality data to train AI models is becoming a bigger hurdle to achieving AI aspirations, according to Appen’s State of Read more…

Microsoft Azure & AMD Solution Channel

Join Microsoft Azure and AMD at SC24

Atlanta, Georgia is the place to be this fall as the high-performance computing (HPC) community convenes for Supercomputing 2024. SC24 will bring together an unparalleled mix of scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, and developers for a week of learning and sharing. Read more…

Report from HALO Details Issues Facing HPC-AI Industry

October 28, 2024

Intersect360 Research has released a comprehensive new report concerning the challenges facing the combined fields of high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). Titled “Issues Facing the HPC-AI Read more…

High-Performance Storage for AI and Analytics Panel

October 31, 2024

When storage is mentioned in an AI or Big Data analytics context, it is assumed to be a high-performance system. In practice, it may not be, and the user eventu Read more…

Shutterstock_556401859

Role Reversal: Google Teases Nvidia’s Blackwell as It Softens TPU Rivalry

October 30, 2024

Customers now have access to Google's homegrown hardware -- its Axion CPU and latest Trillium TPU -- in its Cloud service.  At the same time, Google gave custo Read more…

AI Has a Data Problem, Appen Report Says

October 30, 2024

AI may be a priority at American companies, but the difficulty in managing data and obtaining high quality data to train AI models is becoming a bigger hurdle t Read more…

Report from HALO Details Issues Facing HPC-AI Industry

October 28, 2024

Intersect360 Research has released a comprehensive new report concerning the challenges facing the combined fields of high-performance computing (HPC) and artif Read more…

Archetype AI’s Newton Model Masters Physics From Raw Data

October 28, 2024

Physicists have developed a deep understanding of the fundamental laws of nature through careful observations, experiments, and precise measurements. However, w Read more…

PNNL-Microsoft Collaborate on Cloud Computing for Chemistry, More to Come

October 25, 2024

RICHLAND, Wash.—Some computing challenges are so big that it’s necessary to go all in. That’s the approach a diverse team of scientists and computing expe Read more…

Xeon 6 vs. Zen-5 HPC Benchmark Showdown

October 24, 2024

In this GPU age, CPUs are often considered second citizens because most of the performance comes from the GPU. In most systems, GPUs are separate PCIe devices u Read more…

Nvidia’s Newest Foundation Model Can Actually Spell ‘Strawberry’

October 23, 2024

A new AI model from Nvidia knows just how many R’s are in the word strawberry, a feat that OpenAI’s GPT-4o model has yet to achieve. In what is known as the Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire