English

A Comparison of State-of-the-Art Techniques for Generating Adversarial Malware Binaries

Cryptography and Security 2021-11-24 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

We consider the problem of generating adversarial malware by a cyber-attacker where the attacker's task is to strategically modify certain bytes within existing binary malware files, so that the modified files are able to evade a malware detector such as machine learning-based malware classifier. We have evaluated three recent adversarial malware generation techniques using binary malware samples drawn from a single, publicly available malware data set and compared their performances for evading a machine-learning based malware classifier called MalConv. Our results show that among the compared techniques, the most effective technique is the one that strategically modifies bytes in a binary's header. We conclude by discussing the lessons learned and future research directions on the topic of adversarial malware generation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.11487,
  title  = {A Comparison of State-of-the-Art Techniques for Generating Adversarial Malware Binaries},
  author = {Prithviraj Dasgupta and Zachariah Osman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.11487},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

18 pages, 7 figures; summer project report from NREIP internship at Naval Research Laboratory