Machine learning has already been exploited as a useful tool for detecting malicious executable files. Data retrieved from malware samples, such as header fields, instruction sequences, or even raw bytes, is leveraged to learn models that discriminate between benign and malicious software. However, it has also been shown that machine learning and deep neural networks can be fooled by evasion attacks (also known as adversarial examples), i.e., small changes to the input data that cause misclassification at test time. In this work, we investigate the vulnerability of malware detection methods that use deep networks to learn from raw bytes. We propose a gradientbased attack that is capable of evading a recently-proposed deep network suited to this purpose by only changing few specific bytes at the end of each malware sample, while preserving its intrusive functionality. Promising results show that our adversarial malware binaries evade the targeted network with high probability, even though less than 1% of their bytes are modified.
Further, Kolosnjaji et al. REF investigated the vulnerability of malware detection methods that use deep networks to learn from row bytes and proposed a gradient-based attack which was able to evade detection by modifying a few bytes at the end of each malware file.
Adversarial Malware Binaries: Evading Deep Learning for Malware Detection in Executables
2018 26th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO)
2018 26th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO)
Computer Science