Department of Computer Science & Engineering

The growing sophistication of self-propagating worms and botnets presents a significant challenge for investigators to understand. While honeyfarms have emerged as a powerful tool for capturing and analyzing rapid malware, the size and complexity of large scale, high fidelity honeyfarms make them problematic to operate in a simultaneously safe and effective manner. This paper introduces a universe abstraction that guarantees isolation between multiple malware infestations in a single honeyfarm while maximizing the realism of the honeyfarm as observed by a propagating worm. We demonstrate that each malware strain can be completely isolated without distorting malware spreading behavior, and that this can in fact increase the scalability of honeyfarms.

Pre-2018 CSE ID: CS2007-0902