Most current systems that detect malicious code rely on syntactic signatures. More precisely, these systems use a set of byte strings that characterize known malware instances. Unfortunately, this approach is not able to identify previously unknown malicious code for which no signature exists. The problem gets exacerbated when the malware is polymorphic or metamorphic. In this case, different instances of the same malicious code have a different syntactic representation.

In this chapter, we introduce techniques to characterize the behavioral and structural properties of binary code. These techniques can be used to generate more abstract, semantically-rich descriptions of malware, and to characterize classes of malicious code instead of specific instances. This makes the specification more robust against modifications of the syntactic layout of the code. Also, in some cases, it allows for the detection of novel malware instances.