Title
Automatic malware classification and new malware detection using machine learning.
Abstract
The explosive growth of malware variants poses a major threat to information security. Traditional anti-virus systems based on signatures fail to classify unknown malware into their corresponding families and to detect new kinds of malware programs. Therefore, we propose a machine learning based malware analysis system, which is composed of three modules: data processing, decision making, and new malware detection. The data processing module deals with gray-scale images, Opcode n-gram, and import functions, which are employed to extract the features of the malware. The decision-making module uses the features to classify the malware and to identify suspicious malware. Finally, the detection module uses the shared nearest neighbor (SNN) clustering algorithm to discover new malware families. Our approach is evaluated on more than 20 000 malware instances, which were collected by Kingsoft, ESET NOD32, and Anubis. The results show that our system can effectively classify the unknown malware with a best accuracy of 98.9%, and successfully detects 86.7% of the new malware.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1631/FITEE.1601325
Frontiers of IT & EE
Keywords
Field
DocType
Malware classification, Machine learning, n-gram, Gray-scale image, Feature extraction, Malware detection, TP309.5
Opcode,Data processing,Computer science,Information security,Feature extraction,Artificial intelligence,n-gram,Malware,Cluster analysis,Machine learning,Malware analysis
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
18
9
2095-9184
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.38
28
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Liu Liu141.81
Baosheng Wang235.81
Bo Yu342.14
Qiuxi Zhong441.08