A Countermeasure Against a Whitelist-Based Access Control Bypass Attack Using Dynamic DLL Injection Scheme

Authors

    Dae-Youb Kim Department of Information Security, The University of Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, Republic of Korea

Keywords:

Malware, Ransomware, Blacklist, Whitelist, DLL injection

Abstract

Traditional malware detection technologies collect known malicious programs and analyze their characteristics. Then, a blacklist is made based on the malicious characteristics detected. The user’s program is then checked based on the blacklist to determine the presence of malware. However, such an approach can only detect known malicious programs but not unknown ones. In addition, since such detection technologies generally monitor all programs in the system in real time, they might affect the system’s performance. In order to solve such problems, various methods have been proposed to analyze the major behaviors of malicious programs and how to respond to them. Ransomware is designed to access and encrypt the user’s file. Therefore, a new approach is to produce a whitelist of programs installed in the user’s system and to only allow the programs listed on the whitelist to access the user’s files. However, even with this approach, attackers can still launch a dynamic link library (DLL) injection attack on a regular program registered on the whitelist. Hence, this paper proposes a method to respond effectively to DLL injection attacks.

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Published

2022-12-31