mirai-toushi: Cross-Architecture Mirai Configuration Extractor Utilizing Standalone Ghidra Script
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In recent years, IoT malware frequently launches DDoS attacks, causing massive damage to ISPs. Since Mirai and its variants account for the vast majority of IoT malware, security researchers develop configuration extracting tools to understand its characteristics. However, Mirai is built on diverse architectures (e.g., ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC), developing tools is challenging. Indeed, existing tools only support 1 or 2 architectures. In this study, we utilize Ghidra decompiler and intermediate representation P-Code to reduce architecture-dependent codes, and develop Mirai configuration extractor "mirai-toushi" that supported 8 architectures. To evaluate mirai-toushi against real-world malware, we applied mirai-toushi to 2,426 samples collected in honeypot/IPS from March 2020 to March 2024. The existing tool extracted 673 tables containing data such as C2 server destinations and DoS parameters, while mirai-toushi extracted 1,743 tables. In addition, mirai-toushi extracted 1,641 password lists. The results show that mirai-toushi can extract Mirai configurations effectively. To be widely used by security researchers, we have made mirai-toushi publicly available on GitHub.
Authors: Morishita, Shun, Kobayashi, Satoshi, Hombu, Eisei
Language: English
Subfield: Signal Processing
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W6906833713
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