Using Machine Learning to Detect Malware Similarity by Sagar Chaki.
From the post:
Malware, which is short for “malicious software,” consists of programming aimed at disrupting or denying operation, gathering private information without consent, gaining unauthorized access to system resources, and other inappropriate behavior. Malware infestation is of increasing concern to government and commercial organizations. For example, according to the Global Threat Report from Cisco Security Intelligence Operations, there were 287,298 “unique malware encounters” in June 2011, double the number of incidents that occurred in March. To help mitigate the threat of malware, researchers at the SEI are investigating the origin of executable software binaries that often take the form of malware. This posting augments a previous posting describing our research on using classification (a form of machine learning) to detect “provenance similarities” in binaries, which means that they have been compiled from similar source code (e.g., differing by only minor revisions) and with similar compilers (e.g., different versions of Microsoft Visual C++ or different levels of optimization).
Interesting study in the development of ways to identify a subject that is trying to hide. Not to mention some hard core disassembly and other techniques.