In this paper, we present a black-box attack against API call based machine
learning malware classifiers, focusing on generating adversarial sequences
combining API calls and static features (e.g., printable strings) that will be
misclassified by the classifier without affecting the malware functionality. We
show that this attack is effective against many classifiers due to the
transferability principle between RNN variants, feed forward DNNs, and
traditional machine learning classifiers such as SVM. We also implement GADGET,
a software framework to convert any malware binary to a binary undetected by
malware classifiers, using the proposed attack, without access to the malware
source code.Comment: Accepted as a conference paper at RAID 201