Adversarial examples for malware detection

Abstract

Machine learning models are known to lack robustness against inputs crafted by an adversary. Such adversarial examples can, for instance, be derived from regular inputs by introducing minor—yet carefully selected—perturbations. In this work, we expand on existing adversarial example crafting algorithms to construct a highly-effective attack that uses adversarial examples against malware detection models. To this end, we identify and overcome key challenges that prevent existing algorithms from being applied against malware detection: our approach operates in discrete and often binary input domains, whereas previous work operated only in continuous and differentiable domains. In addition, our technique guarantees the malware functionality of the adversarially manipulated program. In our evaluation, we train a neural network for malware detection on the DREBIN data set and achieve classification performance matching state-of-the-art from the literature. Using the augmented adversarial crafting algorithm we then manage to mislead this classifier for 63% of all malware samples. We also present a detailed evaluation of defensive mechanisms previously introduced in the computer vision contexts, including distillation and adversarial training, which show promising results.