Stegomalware

Stegomalware is a type of malware that uses steganography to hinder detection. This type of malware operates by building a stegosystem to hide a malicious component within its resources and then extracts and executes them dynamically. It is considered one of the most sophisticated and stealthy ways of obfuscation.

The concept of Stegomalware was first introduced by researchers in the context of mobile malware and presented at Inscrypt conference in 2014^[1]

The use of steganography in malware was first applied to botnets communicating over probabilistically unobservable channels ^[2] and the extended to other components of malware engineering such as Return Oriented Programming,^[3] Compile Time ^[4] programming, among others.^[5]

References

1. Suarez-Tangil, Guillermo; Tapiador, Juan E; Peris-Lopez, Pedro (2014). "Stegomalware: Playing Hide and Seek with Malicious Components in Smartphone Apps". In Dongdai Lin; Moti Yung; Jianying Zhou. Information Security and Cryptology. 10th International Conference, Inscrypt. 8957. Beijing, China: Springer International Publishing. pp. 496–515. ISBN 978-3-319-16745-9.
2. Nagaraja, Shishir; Houmansadr, Amir; Piyawongwisal, Pratch; Singh, Vijit; Agarwal, Pragya; Nikita, Borisov (May 2011). "Stegobot: A Covert Social Network Botnet". Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 13th International Conference Information Hiding. 6958. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 299–313.
3. Lu, Kangjie, Siyang Xiong, and Debin Gao (2014). Ropsteg: Program steganography with return oriented programming. 4th ACM conference on Data and application security and privacy.
4. Schrittwieser, Sebastian; et al. (2014). "Covert Computation—Hiding code in code through compile-time obfuscation". Computers & Security.
5. Andriesse, Dennis & Herbert Bos (2014). "Instruction-Level Steganography for Covert Trigger-Based Malware". Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment.