Mind the Gap

Abstract

Machine learning (ML) techniques are being used to detect increasing amounts of malware and variants. Despite successful applications of ML, we hypothesize that the full potential of ML is not realized in malware analysis (MA) due to a semantic gap between the ML and MA communities-as demonstrated in the data that is used. Due in part to the available data, ML has primarily focused on detection whereas MA is also interested in identifying behaviors. We review existing open-source malware datasets used in ML and find a lack of behavioral information that could facilitate stronger impact by ML in MA. As a first step in bridging this gap, we label existing data with behavioral information using open-source MA reports-1) altering the analysis from identifying malware to identifying behaviors, 2) aligning ML better with MA, and 3) allowing ML models to generalize to novel malware in a zero/few-shot learning manner. We classify the behavior of a malware family not seen during training using transfer learning from a state-of-the-art model for malware family classification and achieve 57%-84% accuracy on behavioral identification but fail to outperform the baseline set by a majority class predictor. This highlights opportunities for improvement on this task related to the data representation, the need for malware specific ML techniques, and a larger training set of malware samples labeled with behaviors. Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of the United States government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.