Semester
Spring
Date of Graduation
2019
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Type
PhD
College
Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources
Department
Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Committee Chair
Yanfang Ye
Committee Co-Chair
Donald Adjeroh
Committee Member
Donald Adjeroh
Committee Member
Elaine Eschen
Committee Member
Zachariah Etienne
Committee Member
Katerina Goseva-Popstojanova
Abstract
With computing devices and the Internet being indispensable in people's everyday life, malware has posed serious threats to their security, making its detection of utmost concern. To protect legitimate users from the evolving malware attacks, machine learning-based systems have been successfully deployed and offer unparalleled flexibility in automatic malware detection. In most of these systems, resting on the analysis of different content-based features either statically or dynamically extracted from the file samples, various kinds of classifiers are constructed to detect malware. However, besides content-based features, file-to-file relations, such as file co-existence, can provide valuable information in malware detection and make evasion harder. To better understand the properties of file-to-file relations, we construct the file co-existence graph. Resting on the constructed graph, we investigate the semantic relatedness among files, and leverage graph inference, active learning and graph representation learning for malware detection. Comprehensive experimental results on the real sample collections from Comodo Cloud Security Center demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed learning paradigms.
As machine learning-based detection systems become more widely deployed, the incentive for defeating them increases. Therefore, we go further insight into the arms race between adversarial malware attack and defense, and aim to enhance the security of machine learning-based malware detection systems. In particular, we first explore the adversarial attacks under different scenarios (i.e., different levels of knowledge the attackers might have about the targeted learning system), and define a general attack strategy to thoroughly assess the adversarial behaviors. Then, considering different skills and capabilities of the attackers, we propose the corresponding secure-learning paradigms to counter the adversarial attacks and enhance the security of the learning systems while not compromising the detection accuracy. We conduct a series of comprehensive experimental studies based on the real sample collections from Comodo Cloud Security Center and the promising results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed secure-learning models, which can be readily applied to other detection tasks.
Recommended Citation
Chen, Lingwei, "Intelligent Malware Detection Using File-to-file Relations and Enhancing its Security against Adversarial Attacks" (2019). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 3844.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/3844