In this seminar, you will have the chance to dive into one of several hot topics in malware and attack research. Through the elaboration of a paper you will learn and get amazed about the complexity and challenges of your topic and at the end of the semester, you will share these insights with your fellow students in a presentation.
The seminar is organized like a real academic conference. You need to prepare a written paper (German or English) about the selected topic with 8-10 pages in ACM double-column style.
After submitting your paper at our conference system, you will write two short reviews about two of the papers submitted by your fellow students. In this way, you can give them feedback about how to improve their paper. Then, you will have time to improve your own final paper with reviews from the others.
Finally, you will give a 25-minute talk about your paper and we will provide cookies to enjoy the talks at our small MAD conference.
A peek into modern evasion and anti-reverse engineering techniques (anti-debugging, anti-disassembly and anti-vm)
To successfully take control of a system, malware often exploit vulnerabilities through a specially crafted piece of code -- known as shellcode. This paper will describe the methods and concepts, as well as the challenges behind techniques for effectively analyzing these shellcodes.
Well hidden in the booting process, rootkits enable malware to obtain persistence on a system for a long time. They often allow the installation of hidden files, processes or hidden user accounts in the systems OS, being able to intercept data from terminals, network connections, and the keyboard. This paper will analyze their principles, strategies and modern countermeasures.
Deception as a defense strategy and as a way to collect knowledge from attackers has led to the envision of honeypots. A research field on its own, this paper will explore their foundations, types, goals, limitations and current trends.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are the new workhorse of the malware research community. Is machine learning an effective solution to detect attacks outside of the lab in the real world? How about user behavioral monitoring? Is anomaly detection an adequate problem to be solved with machine learning in the context of security? This paper will discuss where all this trend is going, its problems, challenges and opportunities.
Due to its simplicity and highly profitable business model, ransomware has become extremely fast one of the most widespread attacks on the modern internet. This paper will look at its evolution, its current technical strategies and the proposed countermeasures.