A review of artificial intelligence based malware detection using deep learning

Abstract

Malware propagation by adversaries has witnessed many issues across the globe. Often it is found that malware is released in different countries for monetary gains. With the proliferation of malware spreading activities, it is made possible that now we have malware patterns that are used for training machine learning models. Thus machine learning became indispensable for malware detection. The traditional machine learning models have limitations in performance as the training depth is limited. The emergence of deep learning models paved way for more training possibilities and improvement in detection accuracy with least false positives. This paper reviews literature on deep learning techniques that are used for malware detection. The deep learning methods used for malware detection include CNN, RNN, LSTM and auto encoders. LSTM is found to have memory in the cell to have better possibilities. Auto encoders are found to have better unsupervised approach with encoding and decoding to arrive at abnormalities (malware) detection. There are many contributions found using machine learning and deep learning towards Android malware detection. This paper provides knowledge that leads to further research in deep learning which is essential to improve the state of the art.