Behavioral Detection and Formal Mitigation of Application-Level Persistence Threats in Extensible Text Editors

This paper presents a detailed methodological analysis of the attack surface presented by highly configurable text editors that can be used for building Keylogger scripts. Specifically, it focuses on VIM’s event-driven scripting environment. We examine the strategies by which attackers can establish a dormant, application-level keylogger by exploiting the VIM auto-command native feature autocmd within the user’s configuration .vimrc. We formally construe the threat elements, model the interception effectiveness using a mathematical approach, and visually represent the attack lifecycle using a state-transition graph (STG). Furthermore, we introduce two significant, formalized algorithms, such as "Configuration Integrity Hardening" and "Behavioral EDR Monitoring," as the fundamental components of an advanced defense approach designed to identify the initial compromise and, secondly, subsequent data exfiltration, thereby transforming this stealthy threat into a high-confidence security triggering point for alerts.