24 research outputs found
Classifying Sequences of Extreme Length with Constant Memory Applied to Malware Detection
Recent works within machine learning have been tackling inputs of
ever-increasing size, with cybersecurity presenting sequence classification
problems of particularly extreme lengths. In the case of Windows executable
malware detection, inputs may exceed MB, which corresponds to a time
series with steps. To date, the closest approach to handling
such a task is MalConv, a convolutional neural network capable of processing up
to steps. The memory of CNNs has prevented
further application of CNNs to malware. In this work, we develop a new approach
to temporal max pooling that makes the required memory invariant to the
sequence length . This makes MalConv more memory efficient, and
up to faster to train on its original dataset, while removing the
input length restrictions to MalConv. We re-invest these gains into improving
the MalConv architecture by developing a new Global Channel Gating design,
giving us an attention mechanism capable of learning feature interactions
across 100 million time steps in an efficient manner, a capability lacked by
the original MalConv CNN. Our implementation can be found at
https://github.com/NeuromorphicComputationResearchProgram/MalConv2Comment: To appear in AAAI 202