AKA: These aren’t your grandpa’s malware.
Guest Editors:
• Marcus Botacin, Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Brazil
• Ruimin Sun, Northeastern University (NEU), USA
• Uriel Kosayev, Antivirus Bypass Techniques book author, Founder of MalwareAnaysis.co, Red Team Tech Leader at ABInBev
Motivation: Malware is a constant threat to most organizations, thus it is key to understand malware operations in response to malware infection incidents. However, malware samples are not stationary – they evolve over time, and sometimes in very unexpected manners. In recent years, malware evolved from simple disk artifacts to payloads that operate solely from memory, directly from the registry, by exploiting architectural side-effects, and even more. Researchers and practitioners are often searching for the most up-to-date techniques to counter the spread of malware. However, due to the fast malware evolution pace, the knowledge about the evolution of malware samples is not easily available, formalized, and/or organized. To help mitigate these problems, this issue invites contributions that systematize, organize, and present new knowledge about malware trends and operations that are not covered by the traditional malware literature. We expect contributions from both academia and the industry that cover offensive and defensive cybersecurity research topics. We pay special attention to research works covering memory-based threats, such as fileless and memory-only malware, as these types of attacks are on the rise at the moment.
Topics
We solicit papers on all areas related to unconventional malware and memory-based threats. These include, but are not limited to:
• History of uncommon threats types and their evolution.
• Formalization of concepts about newly-emerged threat types.
• Formal evaluation of attack and defensive techniques.
• Presentation of new attack and defensive techniques.
• Observational studies of recent threats.
• Design of malware detectors.
• Hardware-based approaches to attack and defend systems.
• Data-only attacks and other non-code-based attacks.
• Attacks and defenses to embedded systems.
• Memory forensics of recent threat types.
Important Dates
• Submissions deadline: September 23, 2022
Target Audience:
ACM DTRAP aims to bridge the gap between industry and academia, thus we expect both academic researchers as well as industry practitioners to submit their papers.
Paper Types:
We welcome two broad types of research contributions:
- Research papers: Typical academic manuscripts reporting (i) novel methodologies and results; and/or (ii) reviewing the literature and systematically organizing the knowledge on the topic.
- Field Notes: Industrial and/or Practical reports, analysis, methodologies, detection methods, experience reports, or any other real-world case studies that complement academic research literature. Potential authors are encouraged to submit an abstract for an initial assessment of the suitability of the contribution.
Submission Information
To submit to this special issue, please visit ACM Manuscript Central at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/dtrap and select paper type “Special Issue on Memory-based malware” Details of the author guidelines for Digital Threats: Research and Practice are available at https://dl.acm.org/journal/dtrap/author-guidelines
For questions and further information, please contact dtrap_memory_malware@acm.org.