THESIS DEFENSE Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina Planning A Virtual Lab for Analysis of Malware Candidate: Subhro Sankha Kar Advisor: Dr. Marco Valtorta Date: Friday, February 20, 2015 Time: 10:00 am Place: Swearingen (3A00, Dean’s Conference Room) Abstract I will present a study of the development and availability of different virtual infrastructure platforms and methods of virtualization for the Intel architecture. I will discuss various approaches to deployment and management of a virtual lab that can be used for the study of operating systems and the analysis of malware. My approach is to deploy a para-virtualized analysis lab that is functionally equivalent to the Red Hat malware analysis lab and that uses open source software. I will show how I completed this task using OpenStack, a platform that was not designed for malware analysis. I will present instructions for the deployment and management of such a virtual infrastructure, compare its cost to that of a full hardware lab, and show how the para-virtualized lab overcomes countermeasures taken by a typical piece of malware when running in a virtualized environment