476 research outputs found
PE Header Analysis for Malware Detection
Recent research indicates that effective malware detection can be implemented based on analyzing portable executable (PE) file headers. Such research typically relies on prior knowledge of the header to extract relevant features. However, it is also possible to consider the entire header as a whole, and use this directly to determine whether the file is malware. In this research, we collect a large and diverse malware data set. We then analyze the effectiveness of various machine learning techniques based on PE headers to classify the malware samples. We compare the accuracy and efficiency of each technique considered
Machine Learning Aided Static Malware Analysis: A Survey and Tutorial
Malware analysis and detection techniques have been evolving during the last
decade as a reflection to development of different malware techniques to evade
network-based and host-based security protections. The fast growth in variety
and number of malware species made it very difficult for forensics
investigators to provide an on time response. Therefore, Machine Learning (ML)
aided malware analysis became a necessity to automate different aspects of
static and dynamic malware investigation. We believe that machine learning
aided static analysis can be used as a methodological approach in technical
Cyber Threats Intelligence (CTI) rather than resource-consuming dynamic malware
analysis that has been thoroughly studied before. In this paper, we address
this research gap by conducting an in-depth survey of different machine
learning methods for classification of static characteristics of 32-bit
malicious Portable Executable (PE32) Windows files and develop taxonomy for
better understanding of these techniques. Afterwards, we offer a tutorial on
how different machine learning techniques can be utilized in extraction and
analysis of a variety of static characteristic of PE binaries and evaluate
accuracy and practical generalization of these techniques. Finally, the results
of experimental study of all the method using common data was given to
demonstrate the accuracy and complexity. This paper may serve as a stepping
stone for future researchers in cross-disciplinary field of machine learning
aided malware forensics.Comment: 37 Page
Generating End-to-End Adversarial Examples for Malware Classifiers Using Explainability
In recent years, the topic of explainable machine learning (ML) has been
extensively researched. Up until now, this research focused on regular ML users
use-cases such as debugging a ML model. This paper takes a different posture
and show that adversaries can leverage explainable ML to bypass multi-feature
types malware classifiers. Previous adversarial attacks against such
classifiers only add new features and not modify existing ones to avoid harming
the modified malware executable's functionality. Current attacks use a single
algorithm that both selects which features to modify and modifies them blindly,
treating all features the same. In this paper, we present a different approach.
We split the adversarial example generation task into two parts: First we find
the importance of all features for a specific sample using explainability
algorithms, and then we conduct a feature-specific modification,
feature-by-feature. In order to apply our attack in black-box scenarios, we
introduce the concept of transferability of explainability, that is, applying
explainability algorithms to different classifiers using different features
subsets and trained on different datasets still result in a similar subset of
important features. We conclude that explainability algorithms can be leveraged
by adversaries and thus the advocates of training more interpretable
classifiers should consider the trade-off of higher vulnerability of those
classifiers to adversarial attacks.Comment: Accepted as a conference paper at IJCNN 202
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