BASIC Brief Analytical Survey on Metamorphic Code

Abstract: This paper discusses a variety of obfuscation techniques used by metamorphic malware to change the structure of new variant. Mutation engine is associated with each metamorphic malware which is responsible to make the changes in the structure of new variant using variety of obfuscation techniques. In most of the metamorphic malware, the size of mutation engine remains a little bit small in order to bypass detection. The main objective of malware writers is to make code as complicate as possible along with modern obfuscation techniques. As per our survey, there is not an efficient algorithm to deal with these metamorphic codes. The conventional signature based algorithm used by most of antivirus software is even failed against the metamorphic families.

Keywords: Metamorphic malware, Obfuscation, Polymorphic, Mutation engine.