MalCertain: Enhancing Deep Neural Network Based Android Malware Detection by Tackling Prediction Uncertainty
The long-lasting Android malware threat has attracted significant research efforts in malware detection. In particular, by modeling malware detection as a classification problem, machine learning based approaches, especially deep neural network (DNN) based approaches, are increasingly being used for Android malware detection and have achieved significant improvements over other detection approaches such as signature-based approaches. However, as Android malware evolve rapidly and the presence of adversarial samples, DNN models trained on early constructed samples often yield poor decisions when used to detect newly emerging samples. Fundamentally, this phenomenon can be summarized as the uncertainly in the data (noise or randomness) and the weakness in the training process (insufficient training data). Overlooking these uncertainties poses risks in the model predictions. In this paper, we take the first step to estimate the prediction uncertainty of DNN models in malware detection and leverage these estimates to enhance Android malware detection techniques. Specifically, besides training a DNN model to predict malware, we employ several uncertainty estimation methods to train a Correction Model that determines whether a sample is correctly or incorrectly predicted by the DNN model. We then leverage the estimated uncertainty output by the Correction Model to correct the prediction results of the DNN model, improving the accuracy of the DNN model. Experimental results show that our proposed MalCertain effectively improves the accuracy of the underlying DNN models for Android malware detection by around 21% and significantly improves the detection effectiveness of adversarial Android malware samples by up to 94.38%. Our research sheds light on the promising direction that leverages prediction uncertainty to improve prediction-based software engineering tasks.
Wed 17 AprDisplayed time zone: Lisbon change
11:00 - 12:30 | AI & Security 1Research Track / Journal-first Papers at Grande Auditório Chair(s): Tevfik Bultan University of California at Santa Barbara | ||
11:00 15mTalk | Towards More Practical Automation of Vulnerability Assessment Research Track Shengyi Pan Zhejiang University, Lingfeng Bao Zhejiang University, Jiayuan Zhou Huawei, Xing Hu Zhejiang University, Xin Xia Huawei Technologies, Shanping Li Zhejiang University | ||
11:15 15mTalk | VGX: Large-Scale Sample Generation for Boosting Learning-Based Software Vulnerability Analyses Research Track Yu Nong Washington State University, Richard Fang Washington State University, Guangbei Yi Washington State University, Kunsong Zhao The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Xiapu Luo The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Feng Chen University of Texas at Dallas, Haipeng Cai Washington State University | ||
11:30 15mTalk | MalCertain: Enhancing Deep Neural Network Based Android Malware Detection by Tackling Prediction Uncertainty Research Track haodong li Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Guosheng Xu Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Liu Wang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Xusheng Xiao Arizona State University, Xiapu Luo The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Guoai Xu Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, Haoyu Wang Huazhong University of Science and Technology | ||
11:45 15mTalk | Pre-training by Predicting Program Dependencies for Vulnerability Analysis Tasks Research Track Zhongxin Liu Zhejiang University, Zhijie Tang Zhejiang University, Junwei Zhang Zhejiang University, Xin Xia Huawei Technologies, Xiaohu Yang Zhejiang University | ||
12:00 15mTalk | Investigating White-Box Attacks for On-Device Models Research Track Mingyi Zhou Monash University, Xiang Gao Beihang University, Jing Wu Monash University, Kui Liu Huawei, Hailong Sun Beihang University, Li Li Beihang University | ||
12:15 7mTalk | VulExplainer: A Transformer-Based Hierarchical Distillation for Explaining Vulnerability Types Journal-first Papers Michael Fu Monash University, Van Nguyen Monash University, Kla Tantithamthavorn Monash University, Trung Le Monash University, Australia, Dinh Phung Monash University, Australia Link to publication DOI | ||
12:22 7mTalk | SIEGE: A Semantics-Guided Safety Enhancement Framework for AI-enabled Cyber-Physical Systems Journal-first Papers Jiayang Song University of Alberta, Xuan Xie University of Alberta, Lei Ma The University of Tokyo & University of Alberta DOI |