MDEA: Malware Detection with Evolutionary Adversarial Learning

Xiruo Wang; Risto Miikkulainen

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arXiv · 2002.03331

MDEA: Malware Detection with Evolutionary Adversarial Learning

Xiruo Wang·Risto Miikkulainen

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Abstract

Malware detection have used machine learning to detect malware in programs. These applications take in raw or processed binary data to neural network models to classify as benign or malicious files. Even though this approach has proven effective against dynamic changes, such as encrypting, obfuscating and packing techniques, it is vulnerable to specific evasion attacks where that small changes in the input data cause misclassification at test time. This paper proposes a new approach: MDEA, an Adversarial Malware Detection model uses evolutionary optimization to create attack samples to make the network robust against evasion attacks. By retraining the model with the evolved malware samples, its performance improves a significant margin.

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Xiruo Wang, Risto Miikkulainen. 2020-02-09. MDEA: Malware Detection with Evolutionary Adversarial Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.03331

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