Doctoral colloquium - Zekeri Adams (12.10.2026)
Monday 12.10.2026 at 13:10, Lecture room I 9
Zekeri Adams:
An Ontological Perspective on Malware Analysis
Abstract:
Malware analysis examines malicious software in controlled environments and produces diverse information, from static structural features to dynamic execution traces such as API calls, file-system modifications, registry changes, and network communications. Standards such as MAEC (Malware Attribute Enumeration and Characterization) and STIX (Structured Threat Information eXpression) support the representation and exchange of this information, but their underlying semantic assumptions are not always explicit. This work explores how a foundational ontological perspective can provide greater conceptual clarity in malware analysis. Using the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO), we distinguish enduring entities from events to characterize key concepts in the domain. These distinctions guide the development of MAECO-Lite, a modular ontology for dynamic malware analysis that provides a more coherent representation of malware behaviour and supports semantic interoperability.