Improving the effectiveness and efficiency of dynamic malware analysis with machine learning

Abstract

As the malware threat landscape is constantly evolving and over one million new malware strains are being generated every day [1], early automatic detection of threats constitutes a top priority of cybersecurity research, and amplifies the need for more advanced detection and classification methods that are effective and efficient. In this paper, we present the application of machine learning algorithms to predict the length of time malware should be executed in a sandbox to reveal its malicious intent. We also introduce a novel hybrid approach to malware classification based on static binary analysis and dynamic analysis of malware. Static analysis extracts information from a binary file without executing it, and dynamic analysis captures the behavior of malware in a sandbox environment. Our experimental results show that by turning the aforementioned problems into machine learning problems, it is possible to get an accuracy of up to 90% on the prediction of the malware analysis run time and up to 92% on the classification of malware families.