Two tools that I really found useful this semester are WinAPIOverride for my security project and WEKA for datamining. WinAPIOverride is an API monitoring software for win32 processes. This tool came in very handy when I needed to do dynamic analysis of malware and benign processes. The tool is not an automated dynamic analysis tool and hence we can get the results we want from the tool. The tool can log API calls of almost all win32 executables which in turn helps me analyse the executables' behavior. Similarly WEKA is another find that is very helpful for any scientist who works on datamining. WEKA is a data mining software built in java, which has all the necessary machine learning algorithms inbuilt. It has a lot of tools for classification, clustering and regression inbuilt into it. It is very useful when we need to compare results with various data mining algorithms or if we need a benchmark to compare our algorithm with on efficiency and results.
The tools that I came across this semester that I am not very favorable is the APIlogger tool that was also used to extract API sequences for malware analysis. Not only was the tool very amateurish, the tool had no proper support or documentation.
Tools are always improving. New features are constantly added to tools to upgrade and improve them. These tools make our life easier. It is important for these tools to keep evolving and also very important to develop new tools which solves problems faster which will lead to more innovation and technological advances.
References:
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/
http://jacquelin.potier.free.fr/winapioverride32/
