Chasing infections by unveiling program dependencies.

Metamorphic malware continuously modify their code, while preserving their functionality, in order to foil misuse detection. The key for defeating metamorphism relies in a semantic characterization of the embedding of the mal- ware into the target program. Indeed, a behavioral model of program infection that does not relay on syntactic program features should be able to defeat meta- morphism. Moreover, a general model of infection should be able to express dependences and interactions between the malicious code and the target program. ANI is a general theory for the analysis of dependences of data in a program. We propose an high order theory for ANI, later called HOANI, that allows to study program dependencies. Our idea is then to formalize and study the malware detection problem in terms of HOANI.