Title
Unknown malcode detection and the imbalance problem
Abstract
The recent growth in network usage has motivated the creation of new malicious code for various purposes. Today's signature-based antiviruses are very accurate for known malicious code, but can not detect new malicious code. Recently, classification algorithms were used successfully for the detection of unknown malicious code. But, these studies involved a test collection with a limited size and the same malicious: benign file ratio in both the training and test sets, a situation which does not reflect real-life conditions. We present a methodology for the detection of unknown malicious code, which examines concepts from text categorization, based on n-grams extraction from the binary code and feature selection. We performed an extensive evaluation, consisting of a test collection of more than 30,000 files, in which we investigated the class imbalance problem. In real-life scenarios, the malicious file content is expected to be low, about 10% of the total files. For practical purposes, it is unclear as to what the corresponding percentage in the training set should be. Our results indicate that greater than 95% accuracy can be achieved through the use of a training set that has a malicious file content of less than 33.3%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1007/s11416-009-0122-8
Journal in Computer Virology
Keywords
Field
DocType
imbalance problem.,classification,machine learning,unknown malicious code detection,feature selection
Training set,Data mining,Network usage,Feature selection,Computer science,Computer security,Support vector machine,Binary code,Computer virus,Statistical classification,Semantics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
5
4
2263-8733
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
29
0.98
21
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Robert Moskovitch172939.62
Dima Stopel2573.25
Clint Feher32069.12
Nir Nissim419919.42
Nathalie Japkowicz52581182.43
Yuval Elovici62583204.53