journal article·2022-07-27Open access

Research on the Construction of Malware Variant Datasets and Their Detection Method

Faming Lu, Zhaoyang Cai, Zedong Lin, Yunxia Bao, Mengfan Tang

Applied Sciences· Volume 12· Issue 15

Abstract

Malware detection is of great significance for maintaining the security of information systems. Malware obfuscation techniques and malware variants are increasingly emerging, but their samples and API (application programming interface) sequences are difficult to obtain. This poses difficulties for the development of malware variant detection models. To address this issue in this paper, we first generated a malware variant dataset using the obfuscation technique based on the disassembly and decompilation of malware. Then, an API call dataset of these malware variants was constructed through sandboxing. Compared to similar work, the malware variants and their obfuscated API call sequences generated in this paper were all runnable. After that, taking a public API call sequence dataset of obfuscation-free malware as input, a BERT (bidirectional encoder representation from transformers) pretrained model for malware detection was constructed. To enhance the ability of this pretrained model to handle obfuscation and variants, in this paper, we used adversarial training to improve the robustness and generalization of the detection model under obfuscation. As the experimental results show, the proposed scheme can improve the classification performance of malware variants under obfuscation. The accuracy of the malware variant classification was close to that of the unobfuscated case.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Advanced Malware Detection Techniques · Network Security and Intrusion Detection · Digital and Cyber Forensics

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

College of Computer Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266590, China

Funding

the National Natural Science Foundation, China · the Taishan Scholars Program of Shandong Province · the Excellent Youth Innovation Team Foundation of Shandong Higher School · the Postdoctoral Innovation Foundation of Shandong Province · the Open Foundation of First Institute of Oceanography, China · the Distinguished Teachers Training Plan Program of Shandong University of Science and Technology

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