Malware Analysis with Artificial Intelligence and a Particular Attention on Results Interpretability
This addresses the problem of interpretability in malware detection for cybersecurity analysts, offering a tool to understand detection outcomes, though it is incremental in applying existing image-based methods with attention.
The paper tackles malware detection by transforming binary files into grayscale images, achieving 88% accuracy in detection and 85% precision in identifying packed or encrypted samples, while using attention mechanisms to improve result interpretability.
Malware detection and analysis are active research subjects in cybersecurity over the last years. Indeed, the development of obfuscation techniques, as packing, for example, requires special attention to detect recent variants of malware. The usual detection methods do not necessarily provide tools to interpret the results. Therefore, we propose a model based on the transformation of binary files into grayscale image, which achieves an accuracy rate of 88%. Furthermore, the proposed model can determine if a sample is packed or encrypted with a precision of 85%. It allows us to analyze results and act appropriately. Also, by applying attention mechanisms on detection models, we have the possibility to identify which part of the files looks suspicious. This kind of tool should be very useful for data analysts, it compensates for the lack of interpretability of the common detection models, and it can help to understand why some malicious files are undetected.