Malware Classification with Word Embedding Features

Aparna Kale, Fabio Di Troia, Mark Stamp

2021

Abstract

Malware classification is an important and challenging problem in information security. Modern malware classification techniques rely on machine learning models that can be trained on features such as opcode sequences, API calls, and byte n-grams, among many others. In this research, we consider opcode features. We implement hybrid machine learning techniques, where we engineer feature vectors by training hidden Markov models—a technique that we refer to as HMM2Vec—and Word2Vec embeddings on these opcode sequences. The resulting HMM2Vec and Word2Vec embedding vectors are then used as features for classification algorithms. Specifically, we consider support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), random forest (RF), and convolutional neural network (CNN) classifiers. We conduct substantial experiments over a variety of malware families. Our experiments extend well beyond any previous related work in this field.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Kale A., Di Troia F. and Stamp M. (2021). Malware Classification with Word Embedding Features.In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ForSE, ISBN 978-989-758-491-6, pages 733-742. DOI: 10.5220/0010377907330742

in Bibtex Style

@conference{forse21,
author={Aparna Kale and Fabio Di Troia and Mark Stamp},
title={Malware Classification with Word Embedding Features},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ForSE,},
year={2021},
pages={733-742},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010377907330742},
isbn={978-989-758-491-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ForSE,
TI - Malware Classification with Word Embedding Features
SN - 978-989-758-491-6
AU - Kale A.
AU - Di Troia F.
AU - Stamp M.
PY - 2021
SP - 733
EP - 742
DO - 10.5220/0010377907330742