Machine Learning for Android Malware Detection: Mission Accomplished? A Comprehensive Review of Open Challenges and Future Perspectives

Guerra-Manzanares, Alejandro

doi:10.1016/j.cose.2023.103654

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 182 publications

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“…Based on these considerations, our future investigations will include an exploration of the effect of adversarial training on files generated using re-coding/armouring adversary tactics. Finally, we intend to conduct a similar study in the field of Android malware detection [51], taking into account the fact that the Android operating system (OS) has been the leading platform for mobile devices since 2012. In this domain, [52] recently formalised the problem of realistic adversarial Android attacks, while attack methods against Android malware decision models have been studied in [53,54].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating Realistic Adversarial Attacks against Machine Learning Models for Windows PE Malware Detection

Imran,

Appice,

Malerba

2024

Future Internet

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During the last decade, the cybersecurity literature has conferred a high-level role to machine learning as a powerful security paradigm to recognise malicious software in modern anti-malware systems. However, a non-negligible limitation of machine learning methods used to train decision models is that adversarial attacks can easily fool them. Adversarial attacks are attack samples produced by carefully manipulating the samples at the test time to violate the model integrity by causing detection mistakes. In this paper, we analyse the performance of five realistic target-based adversarial attacks, namely Extend, Full DOS, Shift, FGSM padding + slack and GAMMA, against two machine learning models, namely MalConv and LGBM, learned to recognise Windows Portable Executable (PE) malware files. Specifically, MalConv is a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model learned from the raw bytes of Windows PE files. LGBM is a Gradient-Boosted Decision Tree model that is learned from features extracted through the static analysis of Windows PE files. Notably, the attack methods and machine learning models considered in this study are state-of-the-art methods broadly used in the machine learning literature for Windows PE malware detection tasks. In addition, we explore the effect of accounting for adversarial attacks on securing machine learning models through the adversarial training strategy. Therefore, the main contributions of this article are as follows: (1) We extend existing machine learning studies that commonly consider small datasets to explore the evasion ability of state-of-the-art Windows PE attack methods by increasing the size of the evaluation dataset. (2) To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to carry out an exploratory study to explain how the considered adversarial attack methods change Windows PE malware to fool an effective decision model. (3) We explore the performance of the adversarial training strategy as a means to secure effective decision models against adversarial Windows PE malware files generated with the considered attack methods. Hence, the study explains how GAMMA can actually be considered the most effective evasion method for the performed comparative analysis. On the other hand, the study shows that the adversarial training strategy can actually help in recognising adversarial PE malware generated with GAMMA by also explaining how it changes model decisions.

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