Maltracker: A Fine-Grained NPM Malware Tracker Copiloted by LLM-Enhanced Dataset

As the largest package registry, Node Package Manager (NPM) has become the prime target for various supply chain attacks recently and has been flooded with numerous malicious packages, posing significant security risks to end-users. Learning-based methods have demonstrated promising performance with good adaptability to various types of attacks. However, they suffer from two main limitations. First, they often utilize metadata features or coarse-grained code features extracted at the package level while overlooking complex code semantics. Second, the dataset used to train the model often suffers from a lack of variety both in quantity and diversity, and thus cannot detect significant types of attacks. To address these problems, we introduce Maltracker, a learningbased NPM malware tracker based on fine-grained features empowered by LLM-enhanced dataset. First, Maltracker constructs precise call graphs to extract suspicious functions that are reachable to a pre-defined set of sensitive APIs, and then utilizes community detection algorithm to identify suspicious code gadgets based on program dependency graph, from which fine-grained features are then extracted. To address the second limitation, we extend the dataset using advanced large language models (LLM) to translate malicious functions from other languages (e.g., C/C++, Python, and Go) into JavaScript. Evaluations shows that Maltracker can achieve an improvement of about 12.6% in terms of F1-score at the package level and 31.0% at the function level compared with the SOTA learning-based methods. Moreover, the key components of 𝑀𝑎𝑙𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑘𝑒𝑟 all contribute to the effectiveness of its performance. Finally, Maltracker has also detected 230 new malicious packages in NPM and received 61 thanks letters, among which some contain new malicious behaviors that cannot be detected by existing tools.