Yuval Elovici

Senior Academic

Generic black-box end-to-end attack against state of the art API call based malware classifiers

In this paper, we present a black-box attack against API call based machine learning malware classifiers, focusing on generating adversarial sequences combining API calls and static features (e.g., printable strings) that will be misclassified by the classifier without affecting the malware functionality. We show that this attack is effective against many classifiers due to the transferability principle between RNN variants, feed forward DNNs, and traditional machine learning classifiers such as SVM. We also implement GADGET, a software framework to convert any malware binary to a binary undetected by malware classifiers, using the proposed attack, without access to the malware source code.

Publication language English
Pages 490-510
Publication status Published - 01.01.2018

Keywords

Adversarial attacks
Deep neural networks
Dynamic analysis
Malware classification
Transferability

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Theoretical Computer Science
General Computer Science