With the continuous development and popularization of the Internet, there has been an increasing number of network security problems appearing. Among them, the rapid growth in the number of malware and the emergence of variants have seriously affected the security of the Internet. Traditional malware detection methods require heavy feature engineering, which seriously affects the efficiency of detection. Existing deep-learning-based malware detection methods have problems such as poor generalization ability and long training time. Therefore, we propose a malware classification method based on transfer learning for multi-channel image vision features and ResNet convolutional neural networks. Firstly, the features of malware samples are extracted and converted into grayscale images of three different types. Then, the grayscale image sizes are processed using the bilinear interpolation algorithm to make them uniform in size. Finally, the three grayscale images are synthesized into three-dimensional RGB images, and the RGB images processed using data enhancement are used for training and classification. For the classification model, we used the previous ImageNet dataset (>10 million) and trained all the parameters of ResNet after loading the weights. For the evaluations, an experiment was conducted using the Microsoft BIG benchmark dataset. The experimental results showed that the accuracy on the Microsoft dataset reached 99.99%. We found that our proposed method can better extract the texture features of malware, effectively improve the accuracy and detection efficiency, and outperform the compared models on all performance metrics.
In recent years, malware has experienced explosive growth and has become one of the most severe security threats. However, feature engineering easily restricts the traditional machine learning methods-based malware classification and is hard to deal with massive malware. At the same time, the dynamic analysis methods have the problems of complex operation and high cost, which are not suitable for efficiently classifying large quantities of malware. Therefore, we propose a novel static malware detection method based on this study’s AlexNet convolutional neural network (CNN). Unlike existing solutions, we convert all malware bytes into color images, propose an improved AlexNet architecture, and solve the unbalanced datasets with the data enhancement method. Extensive experiments are performed using the Microsoft malware dataset and the Google Code Jam (GCJ) dataset. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the Microsoft malware dataset reaches 99.99%, and the GCJ dataset reaches 99.38%. We also verify that our method can better extract the texture features of malware and improve the accuracy and detection efficiency.
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