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The deployment of deep learning-based malware detection systems has transformed cybersecurity, offering sophisticated pattern recognition capabilities that surpass traditional signature-based approaches. However, these systems introduce new vulnerabilities requiring systematic investigation. This chapter examines adversarial attacks against graph neural network-based malware detection systems, focusing on semantics-preserving methodologies that evade detection while maintaining program functionality. We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that formulates the attack as a sequential decision making problem, optimizing the insertion of no-operation (NOP) instructions to manipulate graph structure without altering program behavior. Comparative analysis includes three baseline methods: random insertion, hill-climbing, and gradient-approximation attacks. Our experimental evaluation on real world malware datasets reveals significant differences in effectiveness, with the reinforcement learning approach achieving perfect evasion rates against both Graph Convolutional Network and Deep Graph Convolutional Neural Network architectures while requiring minimal program modifications. Our findings reveal three critical research gaps: transitioning from abstract Control Flow Graph representations to executable binary manipulation, developing universal vulnerability discovery across different architectures, and systematically translating adversarial insights into defensive enhancements. This work contributes to understanding adversarial vulnerabilities in graph-based security systems while establishing frameworks for evaluating machine learning-based malware detection robustness.
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Ransomware Classification and Detection With Machine Learning Algorithms
Malicious attacks, malware, and ransomware families pose critical security issues to cybersecurity, and it may cause catastrophic damages to computer systems, data centers, web, and mobile applications across various industries and businesses. Traditional anti-ransomware systems struggle to fight against newly created sophisticated attacks. Therefore, state-of-the-art techniques like traditional and neural network-based architectures can be immensely utilized in the development of innovative ransomware solutions. In this paper, we present a feature selection-based framework with adopting different machine learning algorithms including neural network-based architectures to classify the security level for ransomware detection and prevention. We applied multiple machine learning algorithms: Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Naïve Bayes (NB), Logistic Regression (LR) as well as Neural Network (NN)-based classifiers on a selected number of features for ransomware classification. We performed all the experiments on one ransomware dataset to evaluate our proposed framework. The experimental results demonstrate that RF classifiers outperform other methods in terms of accuracy, F -beta, and precision scores.
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- PAR ID:
- 10347037
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 IEEE 12th Annual Computing and Communication Workshop and Conference (CCWC)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 316-322
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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