arXiv subjects

Jinting Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Jinting Zhu.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Relation-aware based Siamese Denoising Autoencoder for Malware Few-shot Classification

When malware employs an unseen zero-day exploit, traditional security measures such as vulnerability scanners and antivirus software can fail to detect them. This is because these tools rely on known patches and signatures, which do not exist for new zero-day attacks. Furthermore, existing machine learning methods, which are trained on specific and occasionally outdated malware samples, may struggle to adapt to features in new malware. To address this issue, there is a need for a more robust machine learning model that can identify relationships between malware samples without being trained on a particular malware feature set. This is particularly crucial in the field of cybersecurity, where the number of malware samples is limited and obfuscation techniques are widely used. Current approaches using stacked autoencoders aim to remove the noise introduced by obfuscation techniques through reconstruction of the input. However, this approach ignores the semantic relationships between features across different malware samples. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Siamese Neural Network (SNN) that uses relation-aware embeddings to calculate more accurate similarity probabilities based on semantic details of different malware samples. In addition, by using entropy images as inputs, our model can extract better structural information and subtle differences in malware signatures, even in the presence of obfuscation techniques. Evaluations on two large malware sample sets using the N-shot and N-way methods show that our proposed model is highly effective in predicting previously unseen malware, even in the presence of obfuscation techniques.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Task-Aware Meta Learning-based Siamese Neural Network for Classifying Obfuscated Malware

Malware authors apply different techniques of control flow obfuscation, in order to create new malware variants to avoid detection. Existing Siamese neural network (SNN)-based malware detection methods fail to correctly classify different malware families when such obfuscated malware samples are present in the training dataset, resulting in high false-positive rates. To address this issue, we propose a novel task-aware few-shot-learning-based Siamese Neural Network that is resilient against the presence of malware variants affected by such control flow obfuscation techniques. Using the average entropy features of each malware family as inputs, in addition to the image features, our model generates the parameters for the feature layers, to more accurately adjust the feature embedding for different malware families, each of which has obfuscated malware variants. In addition, our proposed method can classify malware classes, even if there are only one or a few training samples available. Our model utilizes few-shot learning with the extracted features of a pre-trained network (e.g., VGG-16), to avoid the bias typically associated with a model trained with a limited number of training samples. Our proposed approach is highly effective in recognizing unique malware signatures, thus correctly classifying malware samples that belong to the same malware family, even in the presence of obfuscated malware variants. Our experimental results, validated by N-way on N-shot learning, show that our model is highly effective in classification accuracy, exceeding a rate \textgreater 91\%, compared to other similar methods.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Malware Triage Approach using a Task Memory based on Meta-Transfer Learning Framework

To enhance the efficiency of incident response triage operations, it is not cost-effective to defend all systems equally in a complex cyber environment. Instead, prioritizing the defense of critical functionality and the most vulnerable systems is desirable. Threat intelligence is crucial for guiding Security Operations Center (SOC) analysts' focus toward specific system activity and provides the primary contextual foundation for interpreting security alerts. This paper explores novel approaches for improving incident response triage operations, including dealing with attacks and zero-day malware. This solution for rapid prioritization of different malware have been raised to formulate fast response plans to minimize socioeconomic damage from the massive growth of malware attacks in recent years, it can also be extended to other incident response. We propose a malware triage approach that can rapidly classify and prioritize different malware classes to address this concern. We utilize a pre-trained ResNet18 network based on Siamese Neural Network (SNN) to reduce the biases in weights and parameters. Furthermore, our approach incorporates external task memory to retain the task information of previously encountered examples. This helps to transfer experience to new samples and reduces computational costs, without requiring backpropagation on external memory. Evaluation results indicate that the classification aspect of our proposed method surpasses other similar classification techniques in terms of performance. This new triage strategy based on task memory with meta-learning evaluates the level of similarity matching across malware classes to identify any risky and unknown malware (e.g., zero-day attacks) so that a defense of those that support critical functionality can be conducted.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

IGRF-RFE: A Hybrid Feature Selection Method for MLP-based Network Intrusion Detection on UNSW-NB15 Dataset

The effectiveness of machine learning models is significantly affected by the size of the dataset and the quality of features as redundant and irrelevant features can radically degrade the performance. This paper proposes IGRF-RFE: a hybrid feature selection method tasked for multi-class network anomalies using a Multilayer perceptron (MLP) network. IGRF-RFE can be considered as a feature reduction technique based on both the filter feature selection method and the wrapper feature selection method. In our proposed method, we use the filter feature selection method, which is the combination of Information Gain and Random Forest Importance, to reduce the feature subset search space. Then, we apply recursive feature elimination(RFE) as a wrapper feature selection method to further eliminate redundant features recursively on the reduced feature subsets. Our experimental results obtained based on the UNSW-NB15 dataset confirm that our proposed method can improve the accuracy of anomaly detection while reducing the feature dimension. The results show that the feature dimension is reduced from 42 to 23 while the multi-classification accuracy of MLP is improved from 82.25% to 84.24%.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

A Few-Shot Meta-Learning based Siamese Neural Network using Entropy Features for Ransomware Classification

Ransomware defense solutions that can quickly detect and classify different ransomware classes to formulate rapid response plans have been in high demand in recent years. Though the applicability of adopting deep learning techniques to provide automation and self-learning provision has been proven in many application domains, the lack of data available for ransomware (and other malware)samples has been raised as a barrier to developing effective deep learning-based solutions. To address this concern, we propose a few-shot meta-learning based Siamese Neural Network that not only detects ransomware attacks but is able to classify them into different classes. Our proposed model utilizes the entropy feature directly extracted from ransomware binary files to retain more fine-grained features associated with different ransomware signatures. These entropy features are used further to train and optimize our model using a pre-trained network (e.g. VGG-16) in a meta-learning fashion. This approach generates more accurate weight factors, compared to feature images are used, to avoid the bias typically associated with a model trained with a limited number of training samples. Our experimental results show that our proposed model is highly effective in providing a weighted F1-score exceeding the rate>86% compared

cs.CR↗