A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
PAD offers a principled approach to malware detection against evasion attacks.
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…
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…
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…
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…
Two novel dataset optimization strategies improve malware traffic detection accuracy.
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…
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…
The Android operating system has been the most popular for smartphones and tablets since 2012. This popularity has led to a rapid raise of Android malware in recent years. The sophistication of Android malware obfuscation and detection avoidance methods have significantly improved, making many traditional malware detec…
Study evaluates predictive uncertainty in malware detection.
HGConv uses HRR to efficiently detect malware, outperforming existing methods.
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…
New adversarial training enhances malware detectors against various attacks.
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 …
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…
Machine-learning models have been recently used for detecting malicious Android applications, reporting impressive performances on benchmark datasets, even when trained only on features statically extracted from the application, such as system calls and permissions. However, recent findings have highlighted the fragili…
Detection of malware-infected computers and detection of malicious web domains based on their encrypted HTTPS traffic are challenging problems, because only addresses, timestamps, and data volumes are observable. The detection problems are coupled, because infected clients tend to interact with malicious domains. Traff…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
Malware detection is a popular application of Machine Learning for Information Security (ML-Sec), in which an ML classifier is trained to predict whether a given file is malware or benignware. Parameters of this classifier are typically optimized such that outputs from the model over a set of input samples most closely…
Detecting PE malware files is now commonly approached using statistical and machine learning models. While these models commonly use features extracted from the structure of PE files, we propose that icons from these files can also help better predict malware. We propose an innovative machine learning approach to extra…
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…
New approach reduces malware detection memory requirements and speeds up training.
pAElla detects malware in DCs/SCs with high accuracy.
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…
GMM-HMMs improve malware classification compared to discrete HMMs.
Machine learning (ML) classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial examples. An adversarial example is an input sample which is slightly modified to induce misclassification in an ML classifier. In this work, we investigate white-box and grey-box evasion attacks to an ML-based malware detector and conduct performance eval…
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…
Android is the predominant mobile operating system for the past few years. The prevalence of devices that can be powered by Android magnetized not merely application developers but also malware developers with criminal intention to design and spread malicious applications that can affect the normal work of Android phon…
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…
For well over a quarter century, detection systems have been driven by models learned from input features collected from real or simulated environments. An artifact (e.g., network event, potential malware sample, suspicious email) is deemed malicious or non-malicious based on its similarity to the learned model at runt…
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…
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…
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 …
New model improves classifier security against evasion attacks by selecting features.
Gradient-based explanations correlate with Android malware classifier robustness.
New method explains high-dimensional text classifiers.
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…
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…
AutoYara generates effective Yara rules faster than humans.
We design a classifier for transactional datasets with application in malware detection. We build the classifier based on the minimum description length (MDL) principle. This involves selecting a model that best compresses the training dataset for each class considering the MDL criterion. To select a model for a datase…
In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of dynamic analysis techniques for identifying malware, using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and Profile Hidden Markov Models (PHMMs), both trained on sequences of API calls. We contrast our results to static analysis using HMMs trained on sequences of opcodes, and show that dyn…
Label manipulation attacks are a subclass of data poisoning attacks in adversarial machine learning used against different applications, such as malware detection. These types of attacks represent a serious threat to detection systems in environments having high noise rate or uncertainty, such as complex networks and I…