arXiv research

This paper presents a novel deep learning based method for automatic malware signature generation and classification. The method uses a deep belief network (DBN), implemented with a deep stack of denoising autoencoders, generating an invariant compact representation of the malware behavior. While conventional signature…

Transformer models improve malware classification, especially for imbalanced datasets.

GMM-HMMs improve malware classification compared to discrete HMMs.

Survey on deep learning for malware classification, including unknown threats.

The use of machine learning and intelligent systems has become an established practice in the realm of malware detection and cyber threat prevention. In an environment characterized by widespread accessibility and big data, the feasibility of malware classification without the use of artificial intelligence-based techn…

We propose to apply deep transfer learning from computer vision to static malware classification. In the transfer learning scheme, we borrow knowledge from natural images or objects and apply to the target domain of static malware detection. As a result, training time of deep neural networks is accelerated while high c…

Behavior of a malware varies with respect to malware types. Therefore,knowing type of a malware affects strategies of system protection softwares. Many malware type classification models empowered by machine and deep learning achieve superior accuracies to predict malware types.Machine learning based models need to do …

Survey of machine learning methods for Windows malware classification.

Artificial neural networks have been successfully used for many different classification tasks including malware detection and distinguishing between malicious and non-malicious programs. Although artificial neural networks perform very well on these tasks, they are also vulnerable to adversarial examples. An adversari…

Effective and efficient mitigation of malware is a long-time endeavor in the information security community. The development of an anti-malware system that can counteract an unknown malware is a prolific activity that may benefit several sectors. We envision an intelligent anti-malware system that utilizes the power of…

In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of benign and malicious Android applications, based on static features. In particular, we focus our attention on the permissions requested by an application. We consider both binary classification of malware versus benign, as well as the multiclass problem, where we clas…

Criminals use malware to disrupt cyber-systems. The number of these malware-vulnerable systems is increasing quickly as common systems, such as vehicles, routers, and lightbulbs, become increasingly interconnected cyber-systems. To address the scale of this problem, analysts divide malware into classes and develop, for…

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be applied to malware binary detection via image classification. The performance, however, is degraded due to the imbalance of malware families (classes). To mitigate this issue, we propose a simple yet effective weighted softmax loss which can be employed as the final laye…

A growing number of threats to Android phones creates challenges for malware detection. Manually labeling the samples into benign or different malicious families requires tremendous human efforts, while it is comparably easy and cheap to obtain a large amount of unlabeled APKs from various sources. Moreover, the fast-p…

The convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is increasingly being applied to new domains, such as malware detection, where it is able to learn malicious behavior from raw bytes extracted from executables. These architectures reach impressive performance with no feature engineering effort involved, but their rob…

We consider the problem of detecting malware with deep learning models, where the malware may be combined with significant amounts of benign code. Examples of this include piggybacking and trojan horse attacks on a system, where malicious behavior is hidden within a useful application. Such added flexibility in augment…

Multi-scanner Antivirus systems provide insightful information on the nature of a suspect application; however there is often a lack of consensus and consistency between different Anti-Virus engines. In this article, we analyze more than 250 thousand malware signatures generated by 61 different Anti-Virus engines after…

HGConv uses HRR to efficiently detect malware, outperforming existing methods.

Adversarial machine learning in the context of image processing and related applications has received a large amount of attention. However, adversarial machine learning, especially adversarial deep learning, in the context of malware detection has received much less attention despite its apparent importance. In this pa…

There is a growing body of literature showing that deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial input modification. Recently this work has been extended from image classification to malware classification over boolean features. In this paper we present several new methods for training restricted networks in this …

New approach reduces malware detection memory requirements and speeds up training.

As machine-learning (ML) based systems for malware detection become more prevalent, it becomes necessary to quantify the benefits compared to the more traditional anti-virus (AV) systems widely used today. It is not practical to build an agreed upon test set to benchmark malware detection systems on pure classification…

Feature engineering is one of the most costly aspects of developing effective machine learning models, and that cost is even greater in specialized problem domains, like malware classification, where expert skills are necessary to identify useful features. Recent work, however, has shown that deep learning models can b…

Existing malware detectors on safety-critical devices have difficulties in runtime detection due to the performance overhead. In this paper, we introduce PROPEDEUTICA, a framework for efficient and effective real-time malware detection, leveraging the best of conventional machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) te…

N-grams have been a common tool for information retrieval and machine learning applications for decades. In nearly all previous works, only a few values of $n$ are tested, with $n > 6$ being exceedingly rare. Larger values of $n$ are not tested due to computational burden or the fear of overfitting. In this work, we pr…

PAD offers a principled approach to malware detection against evasion attacks.

In this paper, we develop four malware detection methods using Hamming distance to find similarity between samples which are first nearest neighbors (FNN), all nearest neighbors (ANN), weighted all nearest neighbors (WANN), and k-medoid based nearest neighbors (KMNN). In our proposed methods, we can trigger the alarm i…

Gradient-based explanations correlate with Android malware classifier robustness.

A number of important applied problems in engineering, finance and medicine can be formulated as a problem of anomaly detection. A classical approach to the problem is to describe a normal state using a one-class support vector machine. Then to detect anomalies we quantify a distance from a new observation to the const…

Malware authors have always been at an advantage of being able to adversarially test and augment their malicious code, before deploying the payload, using anti-malware products at their disposal. The anti-malware developers and threat experts, on the other hand, do not have such a privilege of tuning anti-malware produ…

New approach to adversarial robustness with non-uniform perturbations.

Open set recognition problems exist in many domains. For example in security, new malware classes emerge regularly; therefore malware classification systems need to identify instances from unknown classes in addition to discriminating between known classes. In this paper we present a neural network based representation…

Malware is constantly adapting in order to avoid detection. Model based malware detectors, such as SVM and neural networks, are vulnerable to so-called adversarial examples which are modest changes to detectable malware that allows the resulting malware to evade detection. Continuous-valued methods that are robust to a…

Malware currently presents a number of serious threats to computer users. Signature-based malware detection methods are limited in detecting new malware samples that are significantly different from known ones. Therefore, machine learning-based methods have been proposed, but there are two challenges these methods face…

In this paper, we consider the problem of malware detection and classification based on image analysis. We convert executable files to images and apply image recognition using deep learning (DL) models. To train these models, we employ transfer learning based on existing DL models that have been pre-trained on massive …

New adversarial training enhances malware detectors against various attacks.

In cloud computing environments with many virtual machines, containers, and other systems, an epidemic of malware can be highly threatening to business processes. In this vision paper, we introduce a hierarchical approach to performing malware detection and analysis using several recent advances in machine learning on …

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is vulnerable to malware due to its exposure to external adversaries, making it a lucrative attack vector for malicious actors. A datacenter infected with malware can cause data loss and/or major disruptions to service for its users. This paper analyzes and compares various Conv…

It is needed to ensure the integrity of systems that process sensitive information and control many aspects of everyday life. We examine the use of machine learning algorithms to detect malware using the system calls generated by executables-alleviating attempts at obfuscation as the behavior is monitored rather than t…

A new method clusters malware data more effectively.

Prior work inspired by compression algorithms has described how the Burrows Wheeler Transform can be used to create a distance measure for bioinformatics problems. We describe issues with this approach that were not widely known, and introduce our new Burrows Wheeler Markov Distance (BWMD) as an alternative. The BWMD a…

Information systems have widely been the target of malware attacks. Traditional signature-based malicious program detection algorithms can only detect known malware and are prone to evasion techniques such as binary obfuscation, while behavior-based approaches highly rely on the malware training samples and incur prohi…

Two novel dataset optimization strategies improve malware traffic detection accuracy.

With the rapid proliferation and increased sophistication of malicious software (malware), detection methods no longer rely only on manually generated signatures but have also incorporated more general approaches like machine learning detection. Although powerful for conviction of malicious artifacts, these methods do …

Many efforts have been made to use various forms of domain knowledge in malware detection. Currently there exist two common approaches to malware detection without domain knowledge, namely byte n-grams and strings. In this work we explore the feasibility of applying neural networks to malware detection and feature lear…

Malware allegedly developed by nation-states, also known as advanced persistent threats (APT), are becoming more common. The task of attributing an APT to a specific nation-state or classifying it to the correct APT family is challenging for several reasons. First, each nation-state has more than a single cyber unit th…

Study evaluates predictive uncertainty in malware detection.

Malware constitutes a major global risk affecting millions of users each year. Standard algorithms in detection systems perform insufficiently when dealing with malware passed through obfuscation tools. We illustrate this studying in detail an open source metamorphic software, making use of a hybrid framework to obtain…