Biblio

The main challenge for malware researchers is the large amount of data and files that need to be evaluated for potential threats. Researchers analyze a large number of new malware daily and classify them in order to extract common features. Therefore, a system that can ensure and improve the efficiency and accuracy of the classification is of great significance for the study of malware characteristics. A high-performance, high-efficiency automatic classification system based on multi-feature selection fusion of machine learning is proposed in this paper. Its performance and efficiency, according to our experiments, have been greatly improved compared to single-featured systems.

Malware classification is the process of categorizing the families of malware on the basis of their signatures. This work focuses on classifying the emerging malwares on the basis of comparable features of similar malwares. This paper proposes a novel framework that categorizes malware samples into their families and can identify new malware samples for analysis. For this six diverse classification techniques of machine learning are used. To get more comparative and thus accurate classification results, analysis is done using two different tools, named as Knime and Orange. The work proposed can help in identifying and thus cleaning new malwares and classifying malware into their families. The correctness of family classification of malwares is investigated in terms of confusion matrix, accuracy and Cohen's Kappa. After evaluation it is analyzed that Random Forest gives the highest accuracy.

Knowing malware types in every malware attacks is very helpful to the administrators to have proper defense policies for their system. It must be a massive benefit for the organization as well as the social if the automatic protection systems could themselves detect, classify an existence of new malware types in the whole network system with a few malware samples. This feature helps to prevent the spreading of malware as soon as any damage is caused to the networks. An approach introduced in this paper takes advantage of One-shot/few-shot learning algorithms in solving the malware classification problems by using some well-known models such as Matching Networks, Prototypical Networks. To demonstrate an efficiency of the approach, we run the experiments on the two malware datasets (namely, MalImg and Microsoft Malware Classification Challenge), and both experiments all give us very high accuracies. We confirm that if applying models correctly from the machine learning area could bring excellent performance compared to the other traditional methods, open a new area of malware research.

In this work, we applied a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Xception model to perform malware image classification. The Xception model is a recently developed special CNN architecture that is more powerful with less over- fitting problems than the current popular CNN models such as VGG16. However only a few use cases of the Xception model can be found in literature, and it has never been used to solve the malware classification problem. The performance of our approach was compared with other methods including KNN, SVM, VGG16 etc. The experiments on two datasets (Malimg and Microsoft Malware Dataset) demonstrated that the Xception model can achieve the highest training accuracy than all other approaches including the champion approach, and highest validation accuracy than all other approaches including VGG16 model which are using image-based malware classification (except the champion solution as this information was not provided). Additionally, we proposed a novel ensemble model to combine the predictions from .bytes files and .asm files, showing that a lower logloss can be achieved. Although the champion on the Microsoft Malware Dataset achieved a bit lower logloss, our approach does not require any features engineering, making it more effective to adapt to any future evolution in malware, and very much less time consuming than the champion's solution.

Android malware family classification is an advanced task in Android malware analysis, detection and forensics. Existing methods and models have achieved a certain success for Android malware detection, but the accuracy and the efficiency are still not up to the expectation, especially in the context of multiple class classification with imbalanced training data. To address those challenges, we propose an Android malware family classification model by analyzing the code's specific semantic information based on sensitive opcode sequence. In this work, we construct a sensitive semantic feature-sensitive opcode sequence using opcodes, sensitive APIs, STRs and actions, and propose to analyze the code's specific semantic information, generate a semantic related vector for Android malware family classification based on this feature. Besides, aiming at the families with minority, we adopt an oversampling technique based on the sensitive opcode sequence. Finally, we evaluate our method on Drebin dataset, and select the top 40 malware families for experiments. The experimental results show that the Total Accuracy and Average AUC (Area Under Curve, AUC) reach 99.50% and 98.86% with 45. 17s per Android malware, and even if the number of malware families increases, these results remain good.

As time progresses, new and complex malware types are being generated which causes a serious threat to computer systems. Due to this drastic increase in the number of malware samples, the signature-based malware detection techniques cannot provide accurate results. Different studies have demonstrated the proficiency of machine learning for the detection and classification of malware files. Further, the accuracy of these machine learning models can be improved by using feature selection algorithms to select the most essential features and reducing the size of the dataset which leads to lesser computations. In this paper, we have developed a machine learning based malware analysis framework for efficient and accurate malware detection and classification. We used Cuckoo sandbox for dynamic analysis which executes malware in an isolated environment and generates an analysis report based on the system activities during execution. Further, we propose a feature extraction and selection module which extracts features from the report and selects the most important features for ensuring high accuracy at minimum computation cost. Then, we employ different machine learning algorithms for accurate detection and fine-grained classification. Experimental results show that we got high detection and classification accuracy in comparison to the state-of-the-art approaches.

The number of new malware and new malware variants have been increasing continuously. Security experts analyze malware to capture the malicious properties of malware and to generate signatures or detection rules, but the analysis overheads keep increasing with the increasing number of malware. To analyze a large amount of malware, various kinds of automatic analysis methods are in need. Recently, deep learning techniques such as convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) have been applied for malware classifications. The features used in the previous approches are mostly based on API (Application Programming Interface) information, and the API invocation information can be obtained through dynamic analysis. However, the invocation information may not reflect malicious behaviors of malware because malware developers use various analysis avoidance techniques. Therefore, deep learning-based malware analysis using other features still need to be developed to improve malware analysis performance. In this paper, we propose a malware classification method using the deep learning algorithm based on byte information. Our proposed method uses images generated from malware byte information that can reflect malware behavioral context, and the convolutional neural network-based sentence analysis is used to process the generated images. We performed several experiments to show the effecitveness of our proposed method, and the experimental results show that our method showed higher accuracy than the naive CNN model, and the detection accuracy was about 99%.

Nowadays, the digitization of the world is under a serious threat due to the emergence of various new and complex malware every day. Due to this, the traditional signature-based methods for detection of malware effectively become an obsolete method. The efficiency of the machine learning techniques in context to the detection of malwares has been proved by state-of-the-art research works. In this paper, we have proposed a framework to detect and classify different files (e.g., exe, pdf, php, etc.) as benign and malicious using two level classifier namely, Macro (for detection of malware) and Micro (for classification of malware files as a Trojan, Spyware, Ad-ware, etc.). Our solution uses Cuckoo Sandbox for generating static and dynamic analysis report by executing the sample files in the virtual environment. In addition, a novel feature extraction module has been developed which functions based on static, behavioral and network analysis using the reports generated by the Cuckoo Sandbox. Weka Framework is used to develop machine learning models by using training datasets. The experimental results using the proposed framework shows high detection rate and high classification rate using different machine learning algorithms

Early detection of new kinds of malware always plays an important role in defending the network systems. Especially, if intelligent protection systems could themselves detect an existence of new malware types in their system, even with a very small number of malware samples, it must be a huge benefit for the organization as well as the social since it help preventing the spreading of that kind of malware. To deal with learning from few samples, term ``one-shot learning'' or ``fewshot learning'' was introduced, and mostly used in computer vision to recognize images, handwriting, etc. An approach introduced in this paper takes advantage of One-shot learning algorithms in solving the malware classification problem by using Memory Augmented Neural Network in combination with malware's API calls sequence, which is a very valuable source of information for identifying malware behavior. In addition, it also use some advantages of the development in Natural Language Processing field such as word2vec, etc. to convert those API sequences to numeric vectors before feeding to the one-shot learning network. The results confirm very good accuracies compared to the other traditional methods.

The increasing amount of malware variants seen in the wild is causing problems for Antivirus Software vendors, unable to keep up by creating signatures for each. The methods used to develop a signature, static and dynamic analysis, have various limitations. Machine learning has been used by Antivirus vendors to detect malware based on the information gathered from the analysis process. However, adversarial examples can cause machine learning algorithms to miss-classify new data. In this paper we describe a method for malware analysis by converting malware binaries to images and then preparing those images for training within a Generative Adversarial Network. These unsupervised deep neural networks are not susceptible to adversarial examples. The conversion to images from malware binaries should be faster than using dynamic analysis and it would still be possible to link malware families together. Using the Generative Adversarial Network, malware detection could be much more effective and reliable.

With the increase in the popularity of computerized online applications, the analysis, and detection of a growing number of newly discovered stealthy malware poses a significant challenge to the security community. Signature-based and behavior-based detection techniques are becoming inefficient in detecting new unknown malware. Machine learning solutions are employed to counter such intelligent malware and allow performing more comprehensive malware detection. This capability leads to an automatic analysis of malware behavior. The proposed oblique random forest ensemble learning technique is efficient for malware classification. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with three malware classification datasets from various sources. The results are compared with other variants of decision tree learning models. The proposed system performs better than the existing system in terms of classification accuracy and false positive rate.

Lately, we are facing the Malware crisis due to various types of malware or malicious programs or scripts available in the huge virtual world - the Internet. But, what is malware? Malware can be a malicious software or a program or a script which can be harmful to the user's computer. These malicious programs can perform a variety of functions, including stealing, encrypting or deleting sensitive data, altering or hijacking core computing functions and monitoring users' computer activity without their permission. There are various entry points for these programs and scripts in the user environment, but only one way to remove them is to find them and kick them out of the system which isn't an easy job as these small piece of script or code can be anywhere in the user system. This paper involves the understanding of different types of malware and how we will use Machine Learning to detect these malwares.

In view of the great threat posed by malware and the rapid growing trend about malware variants, it is necessary to determine the category of new samples accurately for further analysis and taking appropriate countermeasures. The network behavior based classification methods have become more popular now. However, the behavior profiling models they used usually only depict partial network behavior of samples or require specific traffic selection in advance, which may lead to adverse effects on categorizing advanced malware with complex activities. In this paper, to overcome the shortages of traditional models, we raise a comprehensive behavior model for profiling the behavior of malware network activities. And we also propose a corresponding malware classification method which can extract and compare the major behavior of samples. The experimental and comparison results not only demonstrate our method can categorize samples accurately in both criteria, but also prove the advantage of our profiling model to two other approaches in accuracy performance, especially under scenario based criteria.

Malware or Malicious Software, are an important threat to information technology society. Deep Neural Network has been recently achieving a great performance for the tasks of malware detection and classification. In this paper, we propose a convolutional gated recurrent neural network model that is capable of classifying malware to their respective families. The model is applied to a set of malware divided into 9 different families and that have been proposed during the Microsoft Malware Classification Challenge in 2015. The model shows an accuracy of 92.6% on the available dataset.

In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework for malware classification. There has been a huge increase in the volume of malware in recent years which poses a serious security threat to financial institutions, businesses and individuals. In order to combat the proliferation of malware, new strategies are essential to quickly identify and classify malware samples so that their behavior can be analyzed. Machine learning approaches are becoming popular for classifying malware, however, most of the existing machine learning methods for malware classification use shallow learning algorithms (e.g. SVM). Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), a deep learning approach, have shown superior performance compared to traditional learning algorithms, especially in tasks such as image classification. Motivated by this success, we propose a CNN-based architecture to classify malware samples. We convert malware binaries to grayscale images and subsequently train a CNN for classification. Experiments on two challenging malware classification datasets, Malimg and Microsoft malware, demonstrate that our method achieves better than the state-of-the-art performance. The proposed method achieves 98.52% and 99.97% accuracy on the Malimg and Microsoft datasets respectively.

In recent years, deep convolution neural networks (DCNNs) have won many contests in machine learning, object detection, and pattern recognition. Furthermore, deep learning techniques achieved exceptional performance in image classification, reaching accuracy levels beyond human capability. Malware variants from similar categories often contain similarities due to code reuse. Converting malware samples into images can cause these patterns to manifest as image features, which can be exploited for DCNN classification. Techniques for converting malware binaries into images for visualization and classification have been reported in the literature, and while these methods do reach a high level of classification accuracy on training datasets, they tend to be vulnerable to overfitting and perform poorly on previously unseen samples. In this paper, we explore and document a variety of techniques for representing malware binaries as images with the goal of discovering a format best suited for deep learning. We implement a database for malware binaries from several families, stored in hexadecimal format. These malware samples are converted into images using various approaches and are used to train a neural network to recognize visual patterns in the input and classify malware based on the feature vectors. Each image type is assessed using a variety of learning models, such as transfer learning with existing DCNN architectures and feature extraction for support vector machine classifier training. Each technique is evaluated in terms of classification accuracy, result consistency, and time per trial. Our preliminary results indicate that improved image representation has the potential to enable more effective classification of new malware.

Behavioral malware detection aims to improve on the performance of static signature-based techniques used by anti-virus systems, which are less effective against modern polymorphic and metamorphic malware. Behavioral malware classification aims to go beyond the detection of malware by also identifying a malware's family according to a naming scheme such as the ones used by anti-virus vendors. Behavioral malware classification techniques use run-time features, such as file system or network activities, to capture the behavioral characteristic of running processes. The increasing volume of malware samples, diversity of malware families, and the variety of naming schemes given to malware samples by anti-virus vendors present challenges to behavioral malware classifiers. We describe a behavioral classifier that uses a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network and data from Microsoft Windows Prefetch files. We demonstrate the model's improvement on the state-of-the-art using a large dataset of malware families and four major anti-virus vendor naming schemes. The model is effective in classifying malware samples that belong to common and rare malware families and can incrementally accommodate the introduction of new malware samples and families.

While the rapid adaptation of mobile devices changes our daily life more conveniently, the threat derived from malware is also increased. There are lots of research to detect malware to protect mobile devices, but most of them adopt only signature-based malware detection method that can be easily bypassed by polymorphic and metamorphic malware. To detect malware and its variants, it is essential to adopt behavior-based detection for efficient malware classification. This paper presents a system that classifies malware by using common behavioral characteristics along with malware families. We measure the similarity between malware families with carefully chosen features commonly appeared in the same family. With the proposed similarity measure, we can classify malware by malware's attack behavior pattern and tactical characteristics. Also, we apply community detection algorithm to increase the modularity within each malware family network aggregation. To maintain high classification accuracy, we propose a process to derive the optimal weights of the selected features in the proposed similarity measure. During this process, we find out which features are significant for representing the similarity between malware samples. Finally, we provide an intuitive graph visualization of malware samples which is helpful to understand the distribution and likeness of the malware networks. In the experiment, the proposed system achieved 97% accuracy for malware classification and 95% accuracy for prediction by K-fold cross-validation using the real malware dataset.

Better understanding of mobile applications' behaviors would lead to better malware detection/classification and better app recommendation for users. In this work, we design a framework AppDNA to automatically generate a compact representation for each app to comprehensively profile its behaviors. The behavior difference between two apps can be measured by the distance between their representations. As a result, the versatile representation can be generated once for each app, and then be used for a wide variety of objectives, including malware detection, app categorizing, plagiarism detection, etc. Based on a systematic and deep understanding of an app's behavior, we propose to perform a function-call-graph-based app profiling. We carefully design a graph-encoding method to convert a typically extremely large call-graph to a 64-dimension fix-size vector to achieve robust app profiling. Our extensive evaluations based on 86,332 benign and malicious apps demonstrate that our system performs app profiling (thus malware detection, classification, and app recommendation) to a high accuracy with extremely low computation cost: it classifies 4024 (benign/malware) apps using around 5.06 second with accuracy about 93.07%; it classifies 570 malware's family (total 21 families) using around 0.83 second with accuracy 82.3%; it classifies 9,730 apps' functionality with accuracy 33.3% for a total of 7 categories and accuracy of 88.1 % for 2 categories.

This paper proposes a deep learning based method for efficient malware classification. Specially, we convert the malware classification problem into the image classification problem, which can be addressed through leveraging convolutional neural networks (CNNs). For many malware families, the images belonging to the same family have similar contours and textures, so we convert the Binary files of malware samples to uncompressed gray-scale images which possess complete information of the original malware without artificial feature extraction. We then design classifier based on Tensorflow framework of Google by combining the deep learning (DL) and malware detection technology. Experimental results show that the uncompressed gray-scale images of the malware are relatively easy to distinguish and the CNN based classifier can achieve a high success rate of 98.2%

With the development of cyber threats on the Internet, the number of malware, especially unknown malware, is also dramatically increasing. Since all of malware cannot be analyzed by analysts, it is very important to find out new malware that should be analyzed by them. In order to cope with this issue, the existing approaches focused on malware classification using static or dynamic analysis results of malware. However, the static and the dynamic analyses themselves are also too costly and not easy to build the isolated, secure and Internet-like analysis environments such as sandbox. In this paper, we propose a lightweight malware classification method based on detection results of anti-virus software. Since the proposed method can reduce the volume of malware that should be analyzed by analysts, it can be used as a preprocess for in-depth analysis of malware. The experimental showed that the proposed method succeeded in classification of 1,000 malware samples into 187 unique groups. This means that 81% of the original malware samples do not need to analyze by analysts.

Despite widespread use of commercial anti-virus products, the number of malicious files detected on home and corporate computers continues to increase at a significant rate. Recently, anti-virus companies have started investing in machine learning solutions to augment signatures manually designed by analysts. A malicious file's determination is often represented as a hierarchical structure consisting of a type (e.g. Worm, Backdoor), a platform (e.g. Win32, Win64), a family (e.g. Rbot, Rugrat) and a family variant (e.g. A, B). While there has been substantial research in automated malware classification, the aforementioned hierarchical structure, which can provide additional information to the classification models, has been ignored. In this paper, we propose the novel idea and study the performance of employing hierarchical learning algorithms for automated classification of malicious files. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research effort which incorporates the hierarchical structure of the malware label in its automated classification and in the security domain, in general. It is important to note that our method does not require any additional effort by analysts because they typically assign these hierarchical labels today. Our empirical results on a real world, industrial-scale malware dataset of 3.6 million files demonstrate that incorporation of the label hierarchy achieves a significant reduction of 33.1% in the binary error rate as compared to a non-hierarchical classifier which is traditionally used in such problems.

Malware classification is a critical part in the cyber-security. Traditional methodologies for the malware classification typically use static analysis and dynamic analysis to identify malware. In this paper, a malware classification methodology based on its binary image and extracting local binary pattern (LBP) features is proposed. First, malware images are reorganized into 3 by 3 grids which is mainly used to extract LBP feature. Second, the LBP is implemented on the malware images to extract features in that it is useful in pattern or texture classification. Finally, Tensorflow, a library for machine learning, is applied to classify malware images with the LBP feature. Performance comparison results among different classifiers with different image descriptors such as GIST, a spatial envelop, and the LBP demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms others.

Detecting malicious code with exact match on collected datasets is becoming a large-scale identification problem due to the existence of new malware variants. Being able to promptly and accurately identify new attacks enables security experts to respond effectively. My proposal is to develop an automated framework for identification of unknown vulnerabilities by leveraging current neural network techniques. This has a significant and immediate value for the security field, as current anti-virus software is typically able to recognize the malware type only after its infection, and preventive measures are limited. Artificial Intelligence plays a major role in automatic malware classification: numerous machine-learning methods, both supervised and unsupervised, have been researched to try classifying malware into families based on features acquired by static and dynamic analysis. The value of automated identification is clear, as feature engineering is both a time-consuming and time-sensitive task, with new malware studied while being observed in the wild.

Nowadays, Malware has become a serious threat to the digitization of the world due to the emergence of various new and complex malware every day. Due to this, the traditional signature-based methods for detection of malware effectively becomes an obsolete method. The efficiency of the machine learning model in context to the detection of malware files has been proved by different researches and studies. In this paper, a framework has been developed to detect and classify different files (e.g exe, pdf, php, etc.) as benign and malicious using two level classifier namely, Macro (for detection of malware) and Micro (for classification of malware files as a Trojan, Spyware, Adware, etc.). Cuckoo Sandbox is used for generating static and dynamic analysis report by executing files in the virtual environment. In addition, a novel model is developed for extracting features based on static, behavioral and network analysis using analysis report generated by the Cuckoo Sandbox. Weka Framework is used to develop machine learning models by using training datasets. The experimental results using proposed framework shows high detection rate with an accuracy of 100% using J48 Decision tree model, 99% using SMO (Sequential Minimal Optimization) and 97% using Random Forest tree. It also shows effective classification rate with accuracy 100% using J48 Decision tree, 91% using SMO and 66% using Random Forest tree. These results are used for detecting and classifying unknown files as benign or malicious.