A packer identification method based on section-entropy plot

Abstract Although packers are useful tools for protecting applications, they can also be used to protect malware. This makes packer identification technology increasingly important for malware analysis. Most existing packer identification methods based on static analysis extract a large number of features from the binary code of an executable. However, these binary code-related features are sensitive to small changes in the executable’s binary code, and it is difficult to understand how these features influence the decision-making processes of machine learning models. To address the shortcomings of existing static analysis-based packer identification methods, we explore extraction of a small number of easily extractable and discriminative features for efficient and accurate packer identification. Specifically, we analyze the packing process and notice that the structures of the packed PEs differ according to the different packing patterns used by the packer. Based on this, a section-entropy plot is proposed, which is generated by a small number of easily extractable and discriminative features that can reflect the overall structure of a PE file. By using GoogLeNet to identify the packer characterized by the section-entropy plot, a p acker i dentification method based on the s ection- e ntropy p lot (PISEP) is constructed, which does not require PE file disassembly and complex feature engineering. The experimental results show that PISEP achieves 99.08% accuracy for identifying seen and unseen types of packers and requires only 0.165 s on average to identify the packer class of a test sample, and thus could be a highly competitive candidate for packer identification.