AdvAttack: Adversarial attack against machine learning-based Android malware detection models

Adversarial Malware Can Be Both Evasive and Deceiving: a Gradient-based Attack Against Prediction and Explainability in Windows PE Malware Detection

In the last years, several gradient-based attacks have been developed to disclose vulnerabilities of deep neural models and strengthen evasion and transferability abilities of adversarial examples created in various domains. In Windows PE malware detection, various gradient-based methods have been recently tested to optimize the editing or injection of adversarial bytes in unused file sections, and create adversarial malicious PE files to evade deep neural models developed for malware detection. On the other hand, gradient information is commonly used in eXplainable AI (XAI) to obtain explanations for opaque decision-making processes of deep neural black-boxes, while Adversarial XAI has recently emerged as an Adversarial Learning field to investigate the security landscape of XAI. In this study, we describe a holistic, gradient-based attack method, named GAME4EXE, formulated to optimize editing of adversarial bytes in the DOS Header and DOS Stub sections of Windows PE malware. The optimization is driven by the dual adversary purpose of generating adversarial malware that evades a target deep neural model, and aligning the explanation of the evading decisions with that of a goodware-like explanation. A preliminary evaluation shows that a gradient-based attack can be effectively formulated in the Windows PE malware domain, to equip the evasion of a deep neural model with the capability to coherently deceive its decision process explainer and harden attack detection.

An advanced framework for malware detection using adversarial learning

Analyzing Malware Behavior Using Generative Neural Networks

Traditional detection techniques are struggling with ever-evolving malware threats like zero-day attacks, polymorphic malware, and adversarial samples. Current detection systems (signature-based, heuristic-based, conventional machine learning) fail to generalize to unseen/obfuscated malware variants. In an attempt to overcome these constraints, this paper investigates the possibilities of employing Generative Neural Networks (GNNs), in the form of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) for the purpose of malware be haviour analysis and detection. We aim to create a novel framework for detecting malware samples that provides some of the best performance in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall while remaining robust to new or unseen malware. This work aims to firstly implement a generative learning-based approach and to measure its adversarial robustness in comparison with the four existing detection techniques. Experimental results show the accuracy, precision, recall of the proposed model is found to be 96.5%, 95.9%, 94.6% with the false positive rate of the model which can be negligible and it is 3.2% which outperforms the traditional machine learning and deep learning models. Our results demonstrate that GNN-based malware detection not only addresses the limitations of conventional approaches in terms of scalability but also provides a more robust and adaptable framework that could be integrated into future real-time threat intelligence and automated defense systems.

Enhancing robustness of deep learning-based malware detection against adversarial attacks

This paper introduces DefendMal, a novel framework that synergistically combines Denoise Autoencoder with Sequence Squeezing, a Context-aware Adversarial Generator (CAG-AdvGAN), Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) adversarial training, and a Positive–Negative Detector with Variational Autoencoder (PNDetector-VAE) to enhance robustness against evolving adversarial threats.

REPLICANT: Learning Policies for Evading and Hardening Malware Detectors

To determine the real-world effectiveness of machine learning based malware detection, it is vital to evaluate its robustness against highly capable adversaries. However, state-of-the-art attacks do not effectively model realistic adversaries, as they often assume access to privileged information such as the training data, feature space, or confidence scores of the target. In this work, we present Replicant, a deep reinforcement learning framework that learns the realistic task of evasion under a strict label-only black-box threat model. Replicant learns a reusable policy on how to modify a malware sample and when to query the target, which transfers across samples, detectors, and feature spaces. Across seven Android malware detectors and three feature spaces, Replicant is the strongest and most query-efficient approach achieving a mean attack success rate of 78.8%, a relative improvement of 20.9%-39.2% over the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, when used for adversarial training, Replicant also outperforms the state-of-the art by producing detectors with more generalizable robustness. With Replicant we demonstrate that learning the task of evasion not only results in stronger attack performance but, crucially, provides a better signal for hardening malware detectors.

Generative Adversarial Networks for Anomaly and Malware Detection

Generative Adversarial Networks or GANs, have become a significant approach in deep learning along with Con-volutional and Recurrent Neural Networks, due to improvements in computing technology and more advanced ways to train these frameworks or models. Since GANs were first introduced in 2014, their application has expanded beyond image generation to include critical security tasks like anomaly detection and malware analysis. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of how GAN-based methods are utilized for identifying unusual and harmful activities in cyber settings. It examines key variants of GANs relevant to this field, explains their fundamental architectures and training methods, and explains their integration into systems to detect anomalies and malware. Additionally, the paper catalogs publicly accessible datasets and evaluation metrics frequently used in the reviewed studies to illustrate common experimental methodologies and research directions. Finally, it addresses ongoing challenges and potential future avenues for employing GANs to counteract emerging cybersecurity threats, highlighting their importance in developing more proactive and robust security measures.