SpyProxy: Execution-based Detection of Malicious Web Content

This paper explores the use of execution-based Web content analysis to protect users from Internet-borne malware. Many anti-malware tools use signatures to identify malware infections on a user's PC. In contrast, our approach is to render and observe active Web content in a disposable virtual machine before it reaches the user's browser, identifying and blocking pages whose behavior is suspicious. Execution-based analysis can defend against undiscovered threats and zero-day attacks. However, our approach faces challenges, such as achieving good interactive performance, and limitations, such as defending against malicious Web content that contains non-determinism.

To evaluate the potential for our execution-based technique, we designed, implemented, and measured a new proxy-based anti-malware tool called SpyProxy. SpyProxy intercepts and evaluates Web content in transit from Web servers to the browser. We present the architecture and design of our SpyProxy prototype, focusing in particular on the optimizations we developed to make on-the-fly execution-based analysis practical. We demonstrate that with careful attention to design, an execution-based proxy such as ours can be effective at detecting and blocking many of today's attacks while adding only small amounts of latency to the browsing experience. Our evaluation shows that SpyProxy detected every malware threat to which it was exposed, while adding only 600 milliseconds of latency to the start of page rendering for typical content.