An increasing trend exploits steganography to conceal payloads in digital images, e.g., to drop malicious executables or to retrieve configuration files. Due to the very attack-specific nature of the exploited hiding mechanisms, developing general detection methods is a hard task. An effective approach concerns the creation of ad-hoc solutions to be integrated within general toolkits, also to holistically face unknown threats. Therefore, this paper discusses the integration of a tool for detecting malicious contents hidden in digital images via the Invoke-PSImage technique within the Secure Intelligent Methods for Advanced Recognition of Malware and Stegomalware framework. Since the real impact of images embedding steganographic threats and the behavior of ad-hoc solutions in realistic scenarios are still unknown territories, this work also showcases a performance evaluation conducted in a nation-wide telecommunication provider. Results demonstrated the effectiveness of the approach and also support the need of modular architectures to face the emerging wave of highly-specialized threats.

Detection of Malicious Images in Production-Quality Scenarios with the SIMARGL Toolkit

Luca Caviglione;Marco Zuppelli;
2022

Abstract

An increasing trend exploits steganography to conceal payloads in digital images, e.g., to drop malicious executables or to retrieve configuration files. Due to the very attack-specific nature of the exploited hiding mechanisms, developing general detection methods is a hard task. An effective approach concerns the creation of ad-hoc solutions to be integrated within general toolkits, also to holistically face unknown threats. Therefore, this paper discusses the integration of a tool for detecting malicious contents hidden in digital images via the Invoke-PSImage technique within the Secure Intelligent Methods for Advanced Recognition of Malware and Stegomalware framework. Since the real impact of images embedding steganographic threats and the behavior of ad-hoc solutions in realistic scenarios are still unknown territories, this work also showcases a performance evaluation conducted in a nation-wide telecommunication provider. Results demonstrated the effectiveness of the approach and also support the need of modular architectures to face the emerging wave of highly-specialized threats.
2022
Istituto di Matematica Applicata e Tecnologie Informatiche - IMATI -
stegomalware
invoke-psimage
information hiding
cyber security
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14243/448658
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