A Cross-Platform Malware Variant Classification based on Image Representation

Abstract

Recent internet development is helping malware researchers to generate malicious code variants through automated tools. Due to this reason, the number of malicious variants is increasing day by day. Consequently, the performance improvement in malware analysis is the critical requirement to stop the rapid expansion of malware. The existing research proved that the similarities among malware variants could be used for detection and family classification. In this paper, a Cross-Platform Malware Variant Classification System (CP-MVCS) proposed that converted malware binary into a grayscale image. Further, malicious features extracted from the grayscale image through Combined SIFT-GIST Malware (CSGM) description. Later, these features used to identify the relevant family of malware variant. CP-MVCS reduced computational time and improved classification accuracy by using CSGM feature description along machine learning classification. The experiment performed on four publically available datasets of Windows OS and Android OS. The experimental results showed that the computation time and malware classification accuracy of CP-MVCS was higher than traditional methods. The evaluation also showed that CP-MVCS was not only differentiated families of malware variants but also identified both malware and benign samples in mix fashion efficiently.