skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Hardware-Assisted Malware Detection using Machine Learning
Malicious software, popularly known as malware, is a serious threat to modern computing systems. A comprehensive cybercrime study by Ponemon Institute highlights that malware is the most expensive attack for organizations, with an average revenue loss of $2.6 million per organization in 2018 (11% increase compared to 2017). Recent high-profile malware attacks coupled with serious economic implications have dramatically changed our perception of threat from malware. Software-based solutions, such as anti-virus programs, are not effective since they rely on matching patterns (signatures) that can be easily fooled by carefully crafted malware with obfuscation or other deviation capabilities. Moreover, software-based solutions are not fast enough for real-time malware detection in safety-critical systems. In this paper, we investigate promising approaches for hardware-assisted malware detection using machine learning. Specifically, we explore how machine learning can be effective for malware detection utilizing hardware performance counters, embedded trace buffer as well as on-chip network traffic analysis.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1936040 1908131
PAR ID:
10286350
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)
ISSN:
1558-1101
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1775-1780
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. null (Ed.)
    Malicious software, popularly known as malware, is widely acknowledged as a serious threat to modern computing systems. Software-based solutions, such as anti-virus software, are not effective since they rely on matching patterns that can be easily fooled by carefully crafted malware with obfuscation or other deviation capabilities. While recent malware detection methods provide promising results through effective utilization of hardware features, the detection results cannot be interpreted in a meaningful way. In this paper, we propose a hardware-assisted malware detection framework using explainable machine learning. This paper makes three important contributions. First, we theoretically establish that our proposed method can provide interpretable explanation of classification results to address the challenge of transparency. Next, we show that the explainable outcome can lead to accurate localization of malicious behaviors. Finally, experimental evaluation using a wide variety of realworld malware benchmarks demonstrates that our framework can produce accurate and human-understandable malware detection results with provable guarantees. 
    more » « less
  2. With the rapid technological advancement, security has become a major issue due to the increase in malware activity that poses a serious threat to the security and safety of both computer systems and stakeholders. To maintain stakeholder’s, particularly, end user’s security, protecting the data from fraudulent efforts is one of the most pressing concerns. A set of malicious programming code, scripts, active content, or intrusive software that is designed to destroy intended computer systems and programs or mobile and web applications is referred to as malware. According to a study, naive users are unable to distinguish between malicious and benign applications. Thus, computer systems and mobile applications should be designed to detect malicious activities towards protecting the stakeholders. A number of algorithms are available to detect malware activities by utilizing novel concepts including Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning. In this study, we emphasize Artificial Intelligence (AI) based techniques for detecting and preventing malware activity. We present a detailed review of current malware detection technologies, their shortcomings, and ways to improve efficiency. Our study shows that adopting futuristic approaches for the development of malware detection applications shall provide significant advantages. The comprehension of this synthesis shall help researchers for further research on malware detection and prevention using AI. 
    more » « less
  3. Android, the most dominant Operating System (OS), experiences immense popularity for smart devices for the last few years. Due to its' popularity and open characteristics, Android OS is becoming the tempting target of malicious apps which can cause serious security threat to financial institutions, businesses, and individuals. Traditional anti-malware systems do not suffice to combat newly created sophisticated malware. Hence, there is an increasing need for automatic malware detection solutions to reduce the risks of malicious activities. In recent years, machine learning algorithms have been showing promising results in classifying malware where most of the methods are shallow learners like Logistic Regression (LR). In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework, called Droid-NNet, for malware classification. However, our proposed method Droid-NNet is a deep learner that outperforms existing cutting-edge machine learning methods. We performed all the experiments on two datasets (Malgenome-215 & Drebin-215) of Android apps to evaluate Droid-NNet. The experimental result shows the robustness and effectiveness of Droid-NNet. 
    more » « less
  4. Since malware has caused serious damages and evolving threats to computer and Internet users, its detection is of great interest to both anti-malware industry and researchers. In recent years, machine learning-based systems have been successfully deployed in malware detection, in which different kinds of classifiers are built based on the training samples using different feature representations. Unfortunately, as classifiers become more widely deployed, the incentive for defeating them increases. In this paper, we explore the adversarial machine learning in malware detection. In particular, on the basis of a learning-based classifier with the input of Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls extracted from the Portable Executable (PE) files, we present an effective evasion attack model (named EvnAttack) by considering different contributions of the features to the classification problem. To be resilient against the evasion attack, we further propose a secure-learning paradigm for malware detection (named SecDefender), which not only adopts classifier retraining technique but also introduces the security regularization term which considers the evasion cost of feature manipulations by attackers to enhance the system security. Comprehensive experimental results on the real sample collections from Comodo Cloud Security Center demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. 
    more » « less
  5. Machine learning techniques are widely used in addition to signatures and heuristics to increase the detection rate of anti-malware software, as they automate the creation of detection models, making it possible to handle an ever-increasing number of new malware samples. In order to foil the analysis of anti-malware systems and evade detection, malware uses packing and other forms of obfuscation. However, few realize that benign applications use packing and obfuscation as well, to protect intellectual property and prevent license abuse. In this paper, we study how machine learning based on static analysis features operates on packed samples. Malware researchers have often assumed that packing would prevent machine learning techniques from building effective classifiers. However, both industry and academia have published results that show that machine-learning-based classifiers can achieve good detection rates, leading many experts to think that classifiers are simply detecting the fact that a sample is packed, as packing is more prevalent in malicious samples. We show that, different from what is commonly assumed, packers do preserve some information when packing programs that is “useful” for malware classification. However, this information does not necessarily capture the sample’s behavior. We demonstrate that the signals extracted from packed executables are not rich enough for machine-learning-based models to (1) generalize their knowledge to operate on unseen packers, and (2) be robust against adversarial examples. We also show that a na¨ıve application of machine learning techniques results in a substantial number of false positives, which, in turn, might have resulted 
    more » « less