Publications and software

Student's thesis and dissertations

• Vivek Notani, Behavior Analysis of Malware, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, May 2012 (Full thesis).
• Anshuman Singh, Addressing Challenges in Machine Learning Based Malware Detection, June 2012.
• Charles LeDoux, Feature Fusion Across Domains for Improved Malware Classification, October 2011.
• Suresh Golconda, CajunBot Path Planner Architecture for Autonomous Ground Vehicles in Urban Environment, December 2009.
• Mohamed R. Chouchane, Approximate Detection of Machine-Authored Malicious Programs, April 2008.
• Matthew Hayes, Simulating Malware Evolution for Testing Phylogenies, March 2008.
• Md Enamul Karim, MinMax Interval Trees, October 2007.
• A. Puntambekar, Terrain Mapping and Obstacle Detection for Unmanned Autonomous Ground Robots Without Sensor Stabilization, M.S. Thesis, December 2006 (Full thesis, PPT Presentation).
• V. Venkitarakrishnan, CBWare - Distributed Middleware for Autonomous Ground Vehicles, M.S. Thesis, December 2006 (Thesis: front pages, body, PPT Presentation).
• R. Mathur, M.S., Normalizing Metamorphic Malware using Term-Rewriting, M.S. Thesis, December 2006 (Full thesis).
• Suresh Golconda, Steering Control for a Skid-Steered Autonomous Ground Vehicle at Varying Speed, M.S. Thesis, February 2005 (Full thesis).
• E. U. Kumar, Abstract Stack Graph as a Representation to Detect Obfuscated Calls in Binaries. Master's Thesis, The Center for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, December 2004 (Full thesis).
• A. Kapoor, An Approach Towards Disassembly of Malicious Binary Executables. Master's Thesis, The Center for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, November 2004 (Full thesis).
• M. Mohammed, Zeroing in on Metamorphic Computer Viruses. Master's Thesis, The Center for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, May 2003 (Full thesis).
• J-C. Deprez, Ph.D., "Detecting Ripple Effects of Program Modifications on a Software System's Functionality," May 2003 (Full dissertation).
• P. K. Singh, A Physiological Decomposition of Virus and Worm Programs. Master's Thesis, The Center for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, May 2002. (Full thesis)
• J-C. Deprez. A Context-Sensitive Formal Transformation for Restructuring Programs. Master's Thesis, The Center for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, December 1997.
  Full thesis (PDF)
• J. Nandigam. A Measure for Module Cohesion. The Center for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, May 1995. Table of contents. (ftp directory).

Publications (classified by area of research)

Viruses and Worms

• Mila Dalla Preda, Roberto Giacobazzi, Arun Lakhotia, and Isabella Mastroeni. 2015. Abstract Symbolic Automata: Mixed syntactic/semantic similarity analysis of executables. In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 329-341. DOI=10.1145/2676726.2676986.
• LeDoux, Charles, and Arun Lakhotia. Malware and Machine Learning. Intelligent Methods for Cyber Warfare. Ronald Yager, Marek Reformat, and Naif Alajilan, eds. Springer International Publishing, 2015. 1-42 ISBN: 978-3-319-08623-1. (paper).
• Deshotels, Luke, Vivek Notani, and Arun Lakhotia. "DroidLegacy: Automated Familial Classification of Android Malware." Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN on Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop 2014. ACM, 2014.
  DroidLegacy: Automated Familial Classification of Android Malware

  Luke Deshotels, Vivek Notani, Arun Lakhotia
  PPREW'14 Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN on Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop 2014, 2014
• Ruttenberg, Brian, et al. "Identifying Shared Software Components to Support Malware Forensics." Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment. Springer International Publishing, 2014. 21-40.
• Ouellette, Jacob, Avi Pfeffer, and Arun Lakhotia. "Countering malware evolution using cloud-based learning." Malicious and Unwanted Software:" The Americas"(MALWARE), 2013 8th International Conference on. IEEE, 2013.
• Charles LeDoux, Arun Lakhotia, Craig Miles, Vivek Notani, and Avi Pfeffer. FuncTracker: Discovering Shared Code to Aid Malware Forensics. LEET'13: 6th USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats. August 2013. (paper)
• Chouchane, Radhouane, Natalia Stakhanova, Andrew Walenstein, and Arun Lakhotia "Detecting machine-morphed malware variants via engine attribution." Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques 9.3 (2013): 137-157. DOI=10.1007/s11416-013-0183-6 (link).
• Arun Lakhotia, Mila Dalla Preda, and Roberto Giacobazzi. 2013. Fast location of similar code fragments using semantic 'juice'. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop (PPREW '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. DOI=10.1145/2430553.2430558
  Fast location of similar code fragments using semantic 'juice'

  Arun Lakhotia, Mila Dalla Preda, Roberto Giacobazzi
  PPREW '13 Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop, 2013
• Arun Lakhotia, Anddrew Walenstein, Craig Miles, and Anshuman Singh, VILO: a rapid learning nearest-neighbor classifier for malware triage. J. of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques, August 2013, Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 109-123
• Anshuman Singh, Andew Walenstein, Arun Lakhotia. "Tracking Concept Drift in Malware Families" AISec'12: Workshop on Security and Artificial Intelligence, November 19 2012, Raleigh, NC, USA, © Copyright 2012 ACM. (Full paper)
  Tracking concept drift in malware families

  Anshuman Singh, Andrew Walenstein, Arun Lakhotia
  AISec '12 Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on Security and artificial intelligence, 2012
• Craig Miles, Arun Lakhotia, Andrew Walenstein. "In situ reuse of logically extracted functional components" Journal in Computer Virology, Springer Paris, 8 (3): 73--84 (DOI: 10.1007/s11416-012-0167-y).
• Craig Miles, Arun Lakhotia, Andrew Walenstein. In Situ Reuse of Logically Extracted Functional Components, European International Conference on Anti-Virus Research, EICAR'2012.
• Mila Dalla Preda, Wu Feng, Roberto Giacobazzi, Richard Greechie and Arun Lakhotia. Twisting Additivity in Program Obfuscation, Sixth International Conference on Information Systems Technology and Management, Workshop on Program Protection and Reverse Engineering, Grenoble, March 28-30, 2012, Grenoble, France.
• Charles Ledoux, Andrew Walenstein and Arun Lakhotia. Improved Malware Classification Through the Use of Differences in Sensor Outputs, Sixth International Conference on Information Systems Technology and Management, Workshop on Program Protection and Reverse Engineering, Grenoble , March 28-30, 2012, Grenoble, France.
• Anshuman Singh, Sumi Singh, Andrew Walenstein and Arun Lakhotia. Deployable classifiers for malware detection, Sixth International Conference on Information Systems Technology and Management, Workshop on Program Protection and Reverse Engineering, Grenoble , March 28-30, 2012, Grenoble, France.
• A. Lakhotia, M. E. Karim, and A. Walenstein, Phylogeny Generation, US Patent Number 7,873,947, January 18, 2011.
• Anshuman Singh and Arun Lakhotia. Game-theoretic Design of an Information Exchange Model for Detecting Packed Malware, 6th IEEE International Conference on Malicious and Unwanted Software (MALWARE 2011), Puerto Rico, October 18-19, 2011.
• Anshuman Singh, Sumi Singh, Andrew Walenstein, and Arun Lakhotia. On Deployable Adversarial Classification Models, (Poster), Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security, October 21, 2011, Chicago, IL.
  On deployable adversarial classification models

  Anshuman Singh, Sumi Singh, Andrew Walenstein, Arun Lakhotia
  AISec '11 Proceedings of the 4th ACM workshop on Security and artificial intelligence, 2011
• Arun Lakhotia, Davidson R. Boccardo, Anshuman Singh, Aleardo Manacero Jr.: Context-sensitive analysis without calling-context. Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation 23(3): 275-313 (2010).
• A. Singh, A. Lakhotia, and A. Walenstein. Malware Antimalware Games, International Conference on Information Warfare, ICIW2010, Wright Patterson Airforce Base, OH, April 8-9, 2010, pp. 319-327.
• D. Boccardo, A. Lakhotia, M. Venable, and Aleardo Manacero, Jr. Adapting Call-String Approach for x86 Obfuscated Binaries, 9th Brazilian Conference on Information and Computer System Security, Campinas, Brazil, Sept-Oct 2009.
• A. Singh, B. Mai, A. Walenstein, A. Lakhotia. On Optimal AV System Strategies Against Obfuscated Malware, Annual Symposium on Information Security 2009, Albany, NY, June 2009.
• M. Hayes, A. Walenstein, and A. Lakhotia. Evaluation of Malware Phylogeny Modelling Systems using Automated Variant Generation. Journal in Computer Virology, Springer, July 2008. DOI: 10.1007/s11416-008-0100-6.
• A. Walenstein, R. Mathur, M. Chouchane, A. Lakhotia. Constructing Malware Normalizers Using Term Rewriting. Journal in Computer Virology, 2008. 4(4), Nov. 2008. pp. 307-322. DOI: 10.1007/s11416-008-0081-5.
• M. R. Chouchane, A. Walenstein, and A. Lakhotia. Using Markov Chains to Filter Machine-morphed Variants of Malicious Programs, Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Malicious and Unwanted Software (Malware 2008), Alexandria, VA, October 2008.
• M. Hayes, A. Walenstein, and A. Lakhotia. Evalution of Malware Phylogeny Modelling Systems using Automated Variant Generation. Proceedings of 17th EICAR Annual Conference (EICAR 2008), Laval, France, May 2008.
• K. Efe, A.V. Asutay, and A. Lakhotia. A User Interface for Exploiting Web Communities in Searching the Web, 4th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST), May 2008.
• Statistical signatures for fast filtering of instruction-substituting metamorphic malware

  Mohamed R. Chouchane, Andrew Walenstein, Arun Lakhotia
  WORM '07 Proceedings of the 2007 ACM workshop on Recurring malcode, 2007
• A. Walenstein, R. Mathur, M. Chouchane, and A. Lakhotia, "Design Space of Metamorphic Malware," 2^nd International Conference on Information Warfare (ICIW2007), Monterey, CA, March 2007 (Paper).
• Using engine signature to detect metamorphic malware

  Mohamed R. Chouchane, Arun Lakhotia
  WORM '06 Proceedings of the 4th ACM workshop on Recurring malcode, 2006
• A. Walenstein, R. Mathur, M. Chouchane, and A. Lakhotia, "Normalizing Metamorphic Malware Using Term Rewriting", IEEE International Workshop on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2006), Philadelphia, PA, September 2006. **RECEIVED BEST PAPER AWARD** (Full paper, Powerpoint presentation).
• A. Lakhotia, E. U. Kumar, and M. Venable, "A Method for Detecting Obfuscated Calls in Malicious Binaries," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering,  Volume 31, Number 11, November 2005, pp. 955-968 (http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TSE.2005.120, sorry I do not have soft copy of final version.).
• M. Karim, A. Walenstein, A. Lakhotia, and L. Parida, "Malware Phylogeny Generation using Permutations of Code," European Research Journal of Computer Virology, 1, 2005, pp. 13-23 (PDF).
• M. Venable, M. R. Chouchane, Md. E. Karim, and A. Lakhotia, "Analyzing Memory Accesses in Obfuscated x86 Executables," K. Julisch and C. Kruegel (Eds.): Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA) 2005, LNCS 3548, pp. 1 - 18, 2005. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005 (PDF, PPT presentation.)
• A. Lakhotia, M. E. Karim, A. Walenstein, and L. Parida, "Malware Phylogeny using Maximal Pi-Patterns", EICAR 2005 Conference: Best Papers Proceedings, Malta, pp. 156-174, April-May, 2005, (Full paper).
• U. K. Eric, A. Kapoor, and A. Lakhotia, "DOC- Answering the Hidden 'Calls' of Virus," Virus Bulletin, April 2005, (Full paper).
• A. Lakhotia and M. Mohammed, "Imposing Order on Program Statements and its implication to AV Scanners," in Proceedings of 11^th IEEE Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Delft, The Netherlands, November 2004, pp. 161-171, © Copyright 2004, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA. (Full paper, Download from IEEE)
• A. Lakhotia and U. Eric, "Stack Shape Analysis to Detect Obfuscated Calls in Binaries," in Proceedings of Fourth IEEE International Workshop on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation, Chicago, IL, September 2004, pp. 17-26. (Full paper)
• P. K. Singh, M. Mohammed, and A. Lakhotia, "Using Static Analysis and Verification for Analyzing Virus and Worm Programs," in Proceedings of Second European Conference on Information Warfare, Reading, UK, June 2003.
• P. K. Singh and A. Lakhotia, "Static Verification of Worm and Virus Behavior in Binary Executables using Model Checking," (extended abstract) in 4^th IEEE Information Assurance Workshop, West Point, NY, June 2003 (Full paper).
• A. Lakhotia, A. Kapoor, and E. U. Kumar, "Are Metamorphic Viruses Really Invincible?" Virus Bulletin, December 2004 and January 2005, (Part 1 and Part 2).
• M. Venable, P. Pathak, and A. Lakhotia, "Getting into Beagle's Backdoor," Virus Bulletin, July 2004, pp. 9-13 (Complete issue).
• A. Lakhotia and P. K. Singh, Challenges in getting 'Formal' with viruses, Virus Bulletin, September 2003 (Complete Issue).
• Analysis and detection of computer viruses and worms: an annotated bibliography

  Prabhat K. Singh, Arun Lakhotia
  ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 2002

Autonomous Ground Vehicles

• A. Fekih, S. Golconda, J. Herpin, A. Lakhotia, "Steering Controller of the CajunBot II," Chapter 8, pp.195-207, Experience from the DARPA Urban Challenge, Springer, 2012. (Book chapter link )
• J. Herpin, A. Fekih, S. Golconda, and A. Lakhotia. Steering Control of the Autonomous Vehicle: CajunBot, Journal of Aerospace Computing, Information, and Communication, 4 (12), 2007, 1134-1142, DOI: 10.2514/1.35050. (Full paper)
• Guest editor, IEEE Computer, December 2006, Special Issue on Unmanned Vehicles
• G. Seetharaman, A. Lakhotia, E. P. Blasch, Unmanned Vehicles Come of Age: The DARPA Grand Challenge, IEEE Computer, 39 (12), pp. 26-29, December 2006 (link).
• A. Lakhotia, S. Golconda, A. Maida, P. Mejia, A. Puntambekar, G. Seetharaman, and S. Wilson, "CajunBot: Architecture and Algorithms," Journal of Field Robotics, 23 (8), 2006, 555-578, DOI: 10.1002/rob.20129, (Full paper).
• A. Maida, S. Golconda, P. Mejia, A. Lakhotia, and C. Cavanaugh, "Subgoal-based local navigation and obstacle avoidance using a grid-distance field," International Journal of Vehicle Autonomous Systems (IJVAS) 4 (2-4), 2006, pp. 122-142, (Full paper).
• S. Golconda, P. Mejia, and A. Lakhotia, "Extendable Grid Representation for Navigation and Obstacle Detection," IEEE Position Location and Navigation Symposium (PLANS 2006), San Diego, April 2006.

Reverse engineering

• A. Lakhotia and J-C. Deprez, "Restructuring functions with low cohesion," In Proceedings of the 6th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, (WCRE'99), Atlanta, GA, USA, October 6-8, 1999, © Copyright 1999, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA. (Abstract) (Full paper)
• A. Lakhotia and J-C. Deprez, "Restructuring programs by tucking statements into functions." Journal of Information & Software Technology, 40, © Copyright 1998, Elsevier Science B.V., pp. 677-689. (Abstract) (Full paper)
• A. Lakhotia. "DIME: A Direct Manipulation Environment for Evolutionary Development of Software", In Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Program Comprehension, (IWPC'98) Ischia, Italy, June 1998, © Copyright 1998, IEEE Computer Society Press, 72-79. (Abstract) (Full paper)
• J. Gravley and A. Lakhotia, "Identifying enumeration types modeled with symbolic constants", Proc. of 3rd Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Monterey, CA, November 1996, © Copyright 1996, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 227-236. (abstract) (full paper)
• A. Lakhotia, "Clustsys: A system for creating software subsystem classifications", Documentation for the Clustsys system,(abstract) (full paper)
• A. Lakhotia, "Wolf: a tool to recover dataflow oriented design from source code", Fifth Annual Workshop on Systems Reengineering Technology, Monterey, CA, Sponsored by Naval Surface Warfare Center, February 1995. (full paper)
• A. Lakhotia and J. M. Gravley, "Toward Experimental Evaluation of Subsystem Classification Recovery Techniques," Proc. of 2nd Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Toronto, July 1995, © Copyright 1995, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 262-269. (abstract) (full paper)
• A. Lakhotia, "A unified framework for software subsystem classification techniques," J. Systems and Software, © Elsevier Science, Inc., Volume 36, March 1997, pp. 211-231. (abstract) (full paper)
• A. Lakhotia, "An approach to recovering data flow oriented design of a software system," (abstract) (full paper )
• A. Lakhotia, "What is the appropriate abstraction for understanding and reengineering a software system?" appeared in IEEE Reverse Engineering Newsletter. ( full paper)
• A. Lakhotia, "Architecture recovery techniques: a unified view and a measure of their goodness,(abstract) ( full paper)

  (A old version of the two subsytem classification papers. I now use the phrase subsystem classification instead of architecture recovery).

• A. Lakhotia, S. Mohan, & P. Poolkasem, "On evaluating the goodness of architecture recovery techniques," TR-92-5-4, 1992. (full paper)

Program understanding experiments

• A. Lakhotia, "Requirements for Thought.Log--a system to log thoughts," March 1996. ( full paper)
• A. Lakhotia, "Understanding someone else's code: Analysis of experiences," J. Systems and Software, © Elsevier Science, Inc., Volume 23, Dec. 1993., pp. 269-175. ( full paper) for an earlier version that appeared in Reverse engineering Newsletter, 1993
• A. Lakhotia, "Analysis of experiences with modifying computer programs,"(abstract) (Full paper ).

Software metrics

• J. Nandigam, A. Lakhotia, & C. Cech, "Experimental evaluation of agreement between programmers in applying the rules of cohesion," Journal of Software Maintenance: Research and Practice, John Wiley & Sons, 11, pp. 35-53, 1999.
  An earlier tech report version. Technical Report CACS-TR-5-8-2, April 1998. (Abstract) ( full paper).
• A. Lakhotia, "Rule-based approach to computing module cohesion," Proceedings 15th ICSE, © IEEE Computer Science Press, 1993, pp. 35-44. (abstract) ( full paper).

  Older version. A. Lakhotia and J. Nandigam, "Computing module cohesion," CACS TR-91-5-4, 1991. (full paper )

Flow analysis of programs

Program slicing and integration

• M. Harman, A. Lakhotia, and D. Binkley, "Theory and Algorithms for Slicing Unstructured Programs," Journal of Information and Software Technology, 48 (7): 549-565 (2006).
• A. Lakhotia, J-C. Deprez, and Shreyash S. Kame, "Flow Analysis Models for Program Slicing Algorithms", CACS-TR-99-5-1, July 1999, (abstract) (Full paper)
• A. Lakhotia, "Improved interprocedural slicing algorithm," (abstract) (full paper)
• A. Lakhotia, "Graph Theoretic Foundations of Program Slicing and Integration,"(abstract)(full paper)

Constructing call graph

• Constructing call multigraphs using dependence graphs

  Arun Lakhotia
  POPL '93 Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, 1993
• A. Lakhotia, "Constructing call multigraphs, revisited," internal report. A better algorithm than the version appearing in POPL'93. (abstract) (full paper)

Prolog programming

• A. Lakhotia, L. Sterling, & D. Bojantchev, "Development of a Prolog Tracer by Stepwise Enhancement," Proc. the Third International Conference on Practical Applications of Prolog, Paris, April 1995, © ACM Press. (abstract) ( full paper)

Others

• Kemal Efe, Alp V. Asutay, Arun Lakhotia: Exploring web neighbours in exploratory search. IJWIS 7(2): 152-182 (2011).
• M. Karim, L. Parida, A. Lakhotia, "Using Permutation Patterns for Content-Based Phylogeny," 2006 Workshop on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics (PRIB2006), Hong Kong, China, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Verlag,  August 2006.
• R. Loganantharaj, M. E. Karim, A. Lakhotia, "Recognizing TATA Promoters Based on Discriminating Frequency Analysis of Neighborhood  Tuples," in Proceedings of the First Biotechnology and Bioinformatics Symposium (BIOT-04), Colorado Springs, September 24, 2004.
• K. Efe, V. Raghavan, and A. Lakhotia, "Content and Link Structure Analysis for Searching the Web", Y. Zhang, A. Kandel, T. Y. Lin, Y. Y. Yao, (Eds.), World Scientific Press, 2003 (Full paper).
• T. W. Chan and A. Lakhotia, "Debugging Program Failures Exhibited by Voluminous Data," Journal of Software Maintenance: Research & Practice, John Wiley, Volume 10, pp. 111-150, 1998.

Software systems

• A. Lakhotia, "Requirements for Thought.Log--a system to log thoughts," March 1996. Note this is only a requirements document. Not the software itself. If you know of some system that meets some or all of the requirements please let me know. (full paper )
• A. Lakhotia, "Clustsys: a system for creating software subsystem classifications," (Source code)
• A. Lakhotia and T. Wongweeratorn, "Simple slicer: A program slicer for a toy language." ( Source code)
• A. Lakhotia and L. Sterling, "ProMiX: A partial evaluator for Prolog." ( Source code)
• Collection of assignment programs from a course conducted by me. They may be useful for experimenting with program analysis tools. (Source code )