English

A Convolutional Transformation Network for Malware Classification

Cryptography and Security 2019-09-17 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Modern malware evolves various detection avoidance techniques to bypass the state-of-the-art detection methods. An emerging trend to deal with this issue is the combination of image transformation and machine learning techniques to classify and detect malware. However, existing works in this field only perform simple image transformation methods that limit the accuracy of the detection. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to classify malware by using a deep network on images transformed from binary samples. In particular, we first develop a novel hybrid image transformation method to convert binaries into color images that convey the binary semantics. The images are trained by a deep convolutional neural network that later classifies the test inputs into benign or malicious categories. Through the extensive experiments, our proposed method surpasses all baselines and achieves 99.14% in terms of accuracy on the testing set.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.07227,
  title  = {A Convolutional Transformation Network for Malware Classification},
  author = {Duc-Ly Vu and Trong-Kha Nguyen and Tam V. Nguyen and Tu N. Nguyen and Fabio Massacci and Phu H. Phung},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.07227},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

6 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:16:42.701Z