CIS490 — Behavioral Malware Detection Dataset & Model

Course project for CIS490 (Cybersecurity). The end-goal is an ML model that watches performance metrics on a real device, decides whether the device has been breached, and triggers a hardware-level reset when confidence is high enough. This repository covers the dataset side — we run public malware samples against intentionally vulnerable Linux VMs and capture labeled time-series telemetry that mirrors what the deployed model would see in the field.

The work is grounded in the trust-over-time scoring model from IEEE 9881803.

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What an episode looks like

Each episode runs a target through a labeled phase schedule (clean → armed → infecting → infected_running → dormant → ...) while sampling host-side /proc telemetry at 10 Hz. The dataset's "envelope" is the set of timestamped phase transitions written to labels.jsonl — sharing a monotonic clock with the metric rows so anything aligned in time can be aligned in code.

Tier 2 — real Alpine VM, real workload driven from inside the guest

This is the closest we get to real-malware behaviour without yet running real malware. Telemetry is real /proc/<qemu_pid> from outside the guest, and the load is generated inside the guest by busybox yes (CPU saturation) and dd (disk bursts), driven over the serial console by tools/vm_load_controller.py. Every phase transition in labels.jsonl corresponds to an actual command issued inside the real VM.

The 100% CPU plateaux are yes > /dev/null running on the guest's single vCPU; the IO spikes during infecting are dd if=/dev/urandom producing the sample-drop shape; the dormant drops are the controller killing the load process inside the VM. The infected_running → dormant → infected_running re-entry is the textbook envelope that justifies the whole project framing.

Reproduce with:

uv run python tools/run_real_vm_demo.py --data-root data

Tier 1 — real Alpine VM, idle baseline

Same pipeline, pointed at the real qemu-system process while the guest is doing nothing. Periodic ~10% CPU spikes are KVM/timer interrupts; the single disk-write spike near t=3 s is the guest finishing late-boot activity.

Pipeline-validation plot — synthetic load, real telemetry

This is not real malware and the load is not even running inside a VM — it's a Python program on the host (tools/load_mimic.py) that mimics an XMRig-style envelope. We used it to validate the orchestrator + collector + labeling pipeline before plugging in a real guest. Kept here because it shows the same shape the tier-2 plot above produces from real KVM behaviour.

What's still missing for the real-malware envelope

Tier	What it gives	Status
1 — real VM, idle	confidence the collector reads real KVM behaviour	✅ done
2 — real VM, real workload from inside the guest	first real-load envelope shape	✅ done
3 — real VM, real exploit fire (Metasploitable + msfrpc)	honest armed → infecting transitions	🟡 driver landed, integration pending
4 — real VM, real malware sample (XMRig from MalwareBazaar)	the full envelope we ultimately train on	🚧

The Tier-3 driver lives in exploits/ — a tiny msgpack-over-HTTPS msfrpc client plus an MSFExploitDriver plugged into the orchestrator as the on_phase callback. First canned module: exploits/modules/vsftpd_234_backdoor.toml (Metasploitable2's CVE-2011-2523). End-to-end integration needs msfrpcd running and a Metasploitable2 image at vm/images/, which is the next bring-up step.

For an interactive view of any episode (zoom/pan/hover), run:

tools/show_envelope.sh data/episodes/<episode_id>
# then open http://127.0.0.1:8988/

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Status

• ✅ Receiver (HTTPS PUT, sha256-verified, idempotent) — running on Pi5 via Caddy + mTLS (wg-pki client CA)
• ✅ Orchestrator v0 — single- and scheduled-phase modes, ULID episode ids
• ✅ Host /proc oracle collector (source 1) @ 10 Hz
• ✅ QMP collector (source 2) — query-status / query-blockstats / query-stats, 1 Hz
• ✅ Bridge pcap (source 4) — pure-Python pcap parser + 100 ms-bucketed netflow.jsonl
• ✅ In-guest agent (source 5) — virtio-serial; cidata-embedded for first-boot install on Alpine; host-side reader re-stamps to host clock
• ✅ Synthetic envelope demo — full 8-phase envelope produced end-to-end
• ✅ Real VM (Alpine 3.21 cloud-init under KVM)
• ✅ Tier 2 — real VM, real workload: serial-console-driven load controller fires yes/dd inside the guest at every phase transition
• 🟡 Tier 3 — exploit driver: MSFExploitDriver + msfrpc client + first module config landed; scripts/install-msfrpcd.sh automates msfrpcd setup; scripts/fetch-metasploitable2.sh pulls + verifies the target image (URL+sha256 from operator). Driver v2 (sample-profile-driven workloads) is the next step for ML diversity.
• ✅ Shipper — lab-host ↔ Pi receiver via tar+zstd PUT over WG with mTLS; --ping smoke mode
• ✅ Fleet runner — host-capacity-aware concurrency (tools/run_fleet.py); resource detector reserves cores + RAM headroom; sample manifest with deterministic per-(host, slot, episode) selection so every host on the network produces novel, varied, labeled data
• ✅ Sample manifest — six initial profiles (cryptominer / botnet / ransomware / banking-trojan / fileless / RAT). Real-malware fetch from MalwareBazaar is the Tier-4 follow-up.

Topology note: in this project the Pi5 is the WireGuard-side collector that receives episode tarballs from one or more lab hosts. It is not the deployment target for the model. The deployment target is generic ("any constrained Linux device"). See docs/architecture.md.

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Quick start — run the synthetic envelope demo (~90 s)

git clone https://maxgit.wg/spectral/CIS490.git
cd CIS490

# One-time setup.
uv sync

# Generate one labeled episode (8 phases, 851 telemetry rows, 85 s).
uv run python tools/run_envelope_demo.py --data-root data

# Render a static PNG envelope of that episode.
uv run python tools/plot_envelope.py data/episodes/<episode_id>

# Or open an interactive plot in your browser:
tools/show_envelope.sh data/episodes/<episode_id>

The data lands in data/episodes/<ulid>/:

meta.json              episode metadata (image, snapshot, schedule, host fingerprint)
events.jsonl           orchestrator actions (snapshot_load, phase_transition, episode_end)
labels.jsonl           one row per phase transition — THIS is the envelope
telemetry-proc.jsonl   host /proc sampler at 10 Hz
done.marker            written last; the shipper only sees finished episodes

Quick start — boot a real Linux VM (Cirros)

The phase-2 launcher boots a Cirros qcow2 under KVM and exposes its QMP/monitor sockets and pidfile. The orchestrator then samples the real qemu-system process.

# Pre-staged: vm/images/cirros-baseline.qcow2 with snapshot 'baseline-v1'.
# (See docs/sources.md for the Cirros sha256.)

# Boot in one terminal:
RUN_DIR=/tmp/cis490-vm vm/launch_demo.sh

# In another terminal, point the orchestrator at the VM's pid:
QPID=$(cat /tmp/cis490-vm/qemu.pid)
uv run python -m orchestrator --target-pid $QPID --duration 20

# Plot:
tools/show_envelope.sh data/episodes/<episode_id>

The idle-VM envelope shape is distinct from the synthetic load: periodic ~10% CPU spikes from KVM/timer interrupts, flat ~230 MiB RSS, a single late-boot disk write. That's a real KVM guest you're seeing.

Repository layout

Path	What it holds
docs/architecture.md	Lab topology, KVM choice, snapshot loop, deployment-mirror reasoning
docs/threat-model.md	Train/serve parity rule and the oracle-vs-deployable feature split
docs/data-model.md	On-disk JSONL schema, per-episode layout, phase enum
docs/transport.md	Sender/receiver design — how episodes get to the central collector over WG
docs/deploy.md	One-command install for the lab-host and receiver roles
docs/lab-setup.md	KVM prereqs, VM build, snapshot, virtio-serial wiring
docs/sources.md	Works cited — every tool, dep, sample source, paper, and standard
orchestrator/	State machine that drives the boot → arm → detonate → observe → revert loop
collectors/	One module per telemetry source (host /proc, QMP, perf, pcap, guest agent)
receiver/	Starlette app: PUT /v1/episodes ingest, sha256-verified, idempotent
vm/	qcow2 images, launch scripts, snapshot recipes (binaries gitignored)
tools/	Demo runners, load mimic, plot scripts
exploits/	MSF RPC client + driver + per-module TOML configs (Tier 3)
samples/	Sample manifest (sha256-pinned). Binaries never committed.
training/	Model training code (deferred — schema first)
etc/	systemd units and config templates installed by the deploy scripts

Design decisions — why these choices

• Why VMs (not Docker)? We need a clean snapshot/revert loop and we need to run real malware without compromising the host. KVM gives both at near-native speed; containers share the host kernel and many samples detect containerization and refuse to detonate. See docs/architecture.md.
• Why KVM (not TCG/-icount)? ML training data wants noise to generalize to. KVM is ~15× faster than TCG, which directly multiplies dataset size per wall-clock hour. We pin 1 vCPU + cap CPU% via cgroup to preserve the "constrained device" framing.
• Why JSONL (not a DB yet)? Schema-last. Collect first, decide storage shape after we see what's useful. JSONL is crash-safe, append-only, reshapes trivially into Postgres/Timescale/Parquet.
• Why two models — realistic vs. oracle? Features that exist on a deployed device train the realistic model. Host-side QEMU telemetry (which doesn't exist in deployment) is oracle-only — used to assign honest labels at training time, never as a model input. The accuracy gap between the two measures how much detection power a privileged rootkit can take from us by lying to in-device tools. See docs/threat-model.md.
• Why ULIDs for episode ids? Time-sortable, no coordinator, URL-safe.

Deploying the receiver and lab-host roles

Two roles, one bootstrap command each. Detailed in docs/deploy.md:

• lab-host — runs episodes, ships completed episodes to the receiver.
• receiver — accepts ship uploads, stores tarballs + appends to index.jsonl. Runs on the Pi5 in our setup.

# On a lab host:
./scripts/install-lab-host.sh   # (TODO — currently bring up by hand per docs/deploy.md)

# On the Pi5 (or any always-on WG node):
./scripts/install-receiver.sh   # (TODO — same)

For now both bootstrap scripts are scaffolds; the units and configs they install live in etc/. The receiver itself works today (uv run python -m receiver --config etc/receiver.toml.example — modify paths).

Threat model and feature-availability split

See docs/threat-model.md for the full argument. The short version:

Channel	Vantage	Role
Host /proc/<qemu_pid>	outside guest	oracle (label only)
QEMU QMP query-stats etc.	outside guest	oracle (label only)
perf stat -p <qemu_pid>	outside guest	oracle (label only)
Bridge-side pcap	gateway-style	feature (deployable)
In-guest /proc, perf, thermal	inside guest	feature (deployable)

We collect everything in the lab. Only the features go into the deployed model; the oracles are used to label episodes with high confidence (disagreement between in-guest and host-side data is itself a rootkit signal).

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Citing this work

A short course-project citation, until the dataset reaches a publishable form:

Gorog, M. CIS490 Behavioral Malware Detection Dataset (in progress). Spectral lab, 2026.

See docs/sources.md for everything else this project leans on.