Adversarial Examples for CNN-Based Malware Detectors

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The convolutional neural network (CNN)-based models have achieved tremendous breakthroughs in many end-to-end applications, such as image identification, text classification, and speech recognition. By replicating these successes to the field of malware detection, several CNN-based malware detectors have achieved encouraging performance without significant feature engineering effort in recent years. Unfortunately, by analyzing their robustness using gradient-based algorithms, several studies have shown that some of these malware detectors are vulnerable to the evasion attacks (also known as adversarial examples). However, the existing attack methods can only achieve quite low attack success rates. In this paper, we propose two novel white-box methods and one novel black-box method to attack a recently proposed malware detector. By incorporating the gradient-based algorithm, one of our white-box methods can achieve a success rate of over 99%. Without prior knowledge of the exact structure and internal parameters of the detector, the proposed black-box method can also achieve a success rate of over 70%. In addition, we consider adversarial training as a defensive mechanism in order to resist evasion attacks. While proving the effectiveness of adversarial training, we also analyze its security risk, that is, a large number of adversarial examples can poison the training dataset of the detector. Therefore, we propose a pre-detection mechanism to reject adversarial examples. The experiments show that this mechanism can effectively improve the safety and efficiency of malware detection.