MalwareTotal: Multi-Faceted and Sequence-Aware Bypass Tactics against Static Malware Detection
Recent methods have demonstrated that machine learning (ML) based static malware detection models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, the generated malware often fails to generalize to production-level anti-malware software, as they usually involve multiple detection methods. This calls for universal solutions to the problem of malware variants generation. In this work, we demonstrate how the proposed method, MalwareTotal, has allowed malware variants to continue to abound in ML-based, signature-based, and hybrid anti-malware software. Given a malicious binary, we develop sequential bypass tactics that enable malicious behavior to be concealed within multi-faceted manipulations. Through 12 experiments on real-world malware, we demonstrate that an attacker can consistently bypass detection (98.67%, and 100% attack success rate against ML-based methods EMBER and MalConv, respectively; 95.33%, 92.63%, and 98.52% attack success rate against production-level anti-malware software ClamAV, Avast, and ESET, respectively) without modifying the malware functionality. We further demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art adversarial malware generation techniques both in attack success rate and query consumption (the number of queries to the target model). Moreover, the samples generated by our method have demonstrated transferability in the real-world integrated malware detector, VirusTotal. In addition, we show that common mitigation such as adversarial training on known attacks cannot effectively defend against the proposed attack. Finally, we investigate the value of the generated adversarial examples as a means of hardening victim models through an adversarial training procedure, and demonstrate that the accuracy of the retrained model against generated adversarial examples increases by 88.51 percentage points.
Fri 19 AprDisplayed time zone: Lisbon change
16:00 - 17:30 | Static Detection TechniquesSoftware Engineering in Practice / Research Track at Eugénio de Andrade Chair(s): Valentina Lenarduzzi University of Oulu | ||
16:00 15mTalk | MalwareTotal: Multi-Faceted and Sequence-Aware Bypass Tactics against Static Malware Detection Research Track Shuai He Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Cai Fu Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Hong Hu Pennsylvania State University, Jiahe Chen Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Jianqiang Lv Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Shuai Jiang Huazhong University of Science and Technology Link to publication | ||
16:15 15mTalk | Semantic-Enhanced Static Vulnerability Detection in Baseband Firmware Research Track Yiming Liu Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Cen Zhang Nanyang Technological University, Feng Li Key Laboratory of Network Assessment Technology, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China; School of CyberSpace Security at University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Yeting Li Institute of Information Engineering at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jianhua Zhou Key Laboratory of Network Assessment Technology, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Jian Wang Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanlan Zhan Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yang Liu Nanyang Technological University, Wei Huo Institute of Information Engineering at Chinese Academy of Sciences | ||
16:30 15mTalk | CSChecker: Revisiting GDPR and CCPA Compliance of Cookie Banners on the Web Research Track Mingxue Zhang Zhejiang University, Wei Meng Chinese University of Hong Kong, You Zhou Zhejiang University, Kui Ren Zhejiang University | ||
16:45 15mTalk | Raisin: Identifying Rare Sensitive Functions for Bug Detection Research Track Jianjun Huang Renmin University of China, Jianglei Nie Renmin University of China, Yuanjun Gong Renmin University of China, Wei You Renmin University of China, Bin Liang Renmin University of China, China, Pan Bian Huawei Technologies CO., LTD., China | ||
17:00 15mTalk | Broadly Enabling KLEE to Effortlessly Find Unrecoverable Errors in Rust Software Engineering in Practice Ying Zhang Virginia Tech, Peng Li Zoox, Yu Ding Google, Wang Lingxiang Microsoft, Dan Williams Virginia Tech, Na Meng Virginia Tech Pre-print | ||
17:15 15mTalk | Inference for Ever-Changing Policy of Taint Analysis Software Engineering in Practice Wen-Hao Chiang Amazon Web Services, Peixuan Li Amazon Web Services, Qiang Zhou Amazon Web Services, Subarno Banerjee Amazon Web Services, Martin Schäf Amazon Web Services, Yingjun Lyu Amazon Web Services, Hoan Nguyen Amazon Web Services, Omer Tripp Amazon Web Services |