A Survey of Malware Detection Using Deep Learning

The problem of malicious software (malware) detection and classification is a complex task, and there is no perfect approach. There is still a lot of work to be done. Unlike most other research areas, standard benchmarks are difficult to find for malware detection. This paper aims to investigate recent advances in malware detection on MacOS, Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux using deep learning (DL) by investigating DL in text and image classification, the use of pre-trained and multi-task learning models for malware detection approaches to obtain high accuracy and which the best approach if we have a standard benchmark dataset. We discuss the issues and the challenges in malware detection using DL classifiers by reviewing the effectiveness of these DL classifiers and their inability to explain their decisions and actions to DL developers presenting the need to use Explainable Machine Learning (XAI) or Interpretable Machine Learning (IML) programs. Additionally, we discuss the impact of adversarial attacks on deep learning models, negatively affecting their generalization capabilities and resulting in poor performance on unseen data. We believe there is a need to train and test the effectiveness and efficiency of the current state-of-the-art deep learning models on different malware datasets. We examine eight popular DL approaches on various datasets. This survey will help researchers develop a general understanding of malware recognition using deep learning.

Deep Multi-Task Learning for Malware Image Classification

Malicious software is a pernicious global problem. A novel multi-task learning framework is proposed in this paper for malware image classification for accurate and fast malware detection. We generate bitmap (BMP) and (PNG) images from malware features, which we feed to a deep learning classifier. Our state-of-the-art multi-task learning approach has been tested on a new dataset, for which we have collected approximately 100,000 benign and malicious PE, APK, Mach-o, and ELF examples. Experiments with seven tasks tested with 4 activation functions, ReLU, LeakyReLU, PReLU, and ELU separately demonstrate that PReLU gives the highest accuracy of more than 99.87% on all tasks. Our model can effectively detect a variety of obfuscation methods like packing, encryption, and instruction overlapping, strengthing the beneficial claims of our model, in addition to achieving the state-of-art methods in terms of accuracy.

CNN-LSTM and Transfer Learning Models for Malware Classification based on Opcodes and API Calls

In this paper, we propose a novel model for a malware classification system based on Application Programming Interface (API) calls and opcodes, to improve classification accuracy. This system uses a novel design of combined Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short-Term Memory. We extract opcode sequences and API Calls from Windows malware samples for classification. We transform these features into N-grams (N = 2, 3, and 10)-gram sequences. Our experiments on a dataset of 9,749,57 samples produce high accuracy of 99.91% using the 8-gram sequences. Our method significantly improves the malware classification performance when using a wide range of recent deep learning architectures, leading to state-of-the-art performance. In particular, we experiment with ConvNeXt-T, ConvNeXt-S, RegNetY-4GF, RegNetY-8GF, RegNetY-12GF, EfficientNetV2, Sequencer2D-L, Swin-T, ViT-G/14, ViT-Ti, ViT-S, VIT-B, VIT-L, and MaxViT-B. Among these architectures, Swin-T and Sequencer2D-L architectures achieved high accuracies of 99.82% and 99.70%, respectively, comparable to our CNN-LSTM architecture although not surpassing it.

Classifying Malware Images with Convolutional Neural Network Models

Due to increasing threats from malicious software (malware) in both number and complexity, researchers have developed approaches to automatic detection and classification of malware, instead of analyzing methods for malware files manually in a time-consuming effort. At the same time, malware authors have developed techniques to evade signature-based detection techniques used by antivirus companies. Most recently, deep learning is being used in malware classification to solve this issue. In this paper, we use several convolutional neural network (CNN) models for static malware classification. In particular, we use six deep learning models, three of which are past winners of the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge. The other three models are CNN-SVM, GRU-SVM and MLP-SVM, which enhance neural models with support vector machines (SVM). We perform experiments using the Malimg dataset, which has malware images that were converted from Portable Executable malware binaries. The dataset is divided into 25 malware families. Comparisons show that the Inception V3 model achieves a test accuracy of 99.24%, which is better than the accuracy of 98.52% achieved by the current state-of-the-art system called the M-CNN model.