Massive data mining for polymorphic code detection

Driven by the permanent search for reliable anomaly-based intrusion detection mechanisms, we investigated different statistical methodologies to deal with the detection of polymorphic shellcode. The paper intends to give an overview on existing approaches in the literature as well as a synopsis of our efforts to evaluate the applicability of data mining techniques such as Neural Networks, Self Organizing Maps, Markov Models or Genetic Algorithms in the area of polymorphic code detection. We will then present our achieved results and conclusions.