Compiling and Analyzing Open Source Malware for Research Purposes

Malware obfuscation can make both automatic and manual analysis of its binary code and the contained functionality significantly more time consuming. For malware research it would therefore be useful to be able to study the effects of different obfuscation methods on the resulting binary code. While some obfuscations are applied through rewriting of the binary, others have to be applied at source code level or during compile time. However, the source code of in-the-wild malware is often not available. For this paper, we collected the source code of eleven open source malware samples from the past 12 years and analyzed if they still compile on current systems. Furthermore, basic static analysis was performed to evaluate the usefulness of the resulting binaries for further malware obfuscation research. Our results indicate, that it is possible to compile available samples with moderate effort and the resulting binaries are very well suited for research purposes.