Accurate Comparison of Binary Executables

As the volume of malware inexorably rises, comparison of binary code is of increasing importance to security analysts as a method of automatically classifying new malware samples; purportedly new examples of malware are frequently a simple evolution of existing code, whose differences stem only from a need to avoid detection. This paper presents a polynomial algorithm for calculating the differences between two binaries, obtained by fusing the well-known BinDiff algorithm with the Hungarian algorithm for bi-partite graph matching. This significantly improves the matching accuracy. Additionally a meaningful metric of similarity is calculated, based on graph edit distance, from which an informed comparison of the binaries can be made. The accuracy of this method over the standard approach is demonstrated.