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Enhancing Machine Learning Based Malware Detection Model by Reinforcement Learning

Published: 02 November 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Malware detection is getting more and more attention due to the rapid growth of new malware. As a result, machine learning (ML) has become a popular way to detect malware variants. However, machine learning models can also be cheated. Through reinforcement learning (RL), we can generate new malware samples which can bypass the detection of machine learning. In this paper, a RL model on malware generation named gym-plus is designed. Gym-plus is built based on gym-malware with some improvements. As a result, the probability of evading machine learning based static PE malware detection models is increased by 30%. Based on these newly generated samples, we retrain our detecting model to detect unknown threats. In our test, the detection accuracy of malware increased from 15.75% to 93.5%.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICCNS '18: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communication and Network Security
November 2018
166 pages
ISBN:9781450365673
DOI:10.1145/3290480
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 November 2018

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Author Tags

  1. machine learning
  2. malware evasion
  3. reinforcement learning
  4. static analysis

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