Machine Learning for Malware Evolution Detection
This addresses the need for automated malware evolution detection in cybersecurity, but it appears incremental as it applies existing methods to this specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting when malware evolves over time to help antivirus systems adapt, using machine learning techniques like hidden Markov models and word embeddings on multiple malware families to automate detection without manual analysis.
Malware evolves over time and antivirus must adapt to such evolution. Hence, it is critical to detect those points in time where malware has evolved so that appropriate countermeasures can be undertaken. In this research, we perform a variety of experiments on a significant number of malware families to determine when malware evolution is likely to have occurred. All of the evolution detection techniques that we consider are based on machine learning and can be fully automated -- in particular, no reverse engineering or other labor-intensive manual analysis is required. Specifically, we consider analysis based on hidden Markov models (HMM) and the word embedding techniques HMM2Vec and Word2Vec.