Xiang Ling

Xiaoyu Liang, Yaguan Qian, Jianchang Huang et al.

Adversarial training, as one of the most effective defense methods against adversarial attacks, tends to learn an inclusive decision boundary to increase the robustness of deep learning models. However, due to the large and unnecessary increase in the margin along adversarial directions, adversarial training causes heavy cross-over between natural examples and adversarial examples, which is not conducive to balancing the trade-off between robustness and natural accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial training scheme to achieve a better trade-off between robustness and natural accuracy. It aims to learn a moderate-inclusive decision boundary, which means that the margins of natural examples under the decision boundary are moderate. We call this scheme Moderate-Margin Adversarial Training (MMAT), which generates finer-grained adversarial examples to mitigate the cross-over problem. We also take advantage of logits from a teacher model that has been well-trained to guide the learning of our model. Finally, MMAT achieves high natural accuracy and robustness under both black-box and white-box attacks. On SVHN, for example, state-of-the-art robustness and natural accuracy are achieved.

Xiang Ling, Lingfei Wu, Jiangyu Zhang et al.

Malware has been one of the most damaging threats to computers that span across multiple operating systems and various file formats. To defend against ever-increasing and ever-evolving malware, tremendous efforts have been made to propose a variety of malware detection that attempt to effectively and efficiently detect malware so as to mitigate possible damages as early as possible. Recent studies have shown that, on the one hand, existing ML and DL techniques enable superior solutions in detecting newly emerging and previously unseen malware. However, on the other hand, ML and DL models are inherently vulnerable to adversarial attacks in the form of adversarial examples. In this paper, we focus on malware with the file format of portable executable (PE) in the family of Windows operating systems, namely Windows PE malware, as a representative case to study the adversarial attack methods in such adversarial settings. To be specific, we start by first outlining the general learning framework of Windows PE malware detection based on ML/DL and subsequently highlighting three unique challenges of performing adversarial attacks in the context of Windows PE malware. Then, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic review to categorize the state-of-the-art adversarial attacks against PE malware detection, as well as corresponding defenses to increase the robustness of Windows PE malware detection. Finally, we conclude the paper by first presenting other related attacks against Windows PE malware detection beyond the adversarial attacks and then shedding light on future research directions and opportunities. In addition, a curated resource list of adversarial attacks and defenses for Windows PE malware detection is also available at https://github.com/ryderling/adversarial-attacks-and-defenses-for-windows-pe-malware-detection.