Fast & Furious: Modelling Malware Detection as Evolving Data Streams
This addresses the challenge of evolving malware threats for cybersecurity systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing drift detection and mitigation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of concept drift in malware detection by evaluating its impact on classifiers using Android datasets and proposing a novel data stream pipeline that updates both classifier and feature extractor, which outperformed existing approaches in longitudinal experiments over nine years.
Malware is a major threat to computer systems and imposes many challenges to cyber security. Targeted threats, such as ransomware, cause millions of dollars in losses every year. The constant increase of malware infections has been motivating popular antiviruses (AVs) to develop dedicated detection strategies, which include meticulously crafted machine learning (ML) pipelines. However, malware developers unceasingly change their samples' features to bypass detection. This constant evolution of malware samples causes changes to the data distribution (i.e., concept drifts) that directly affect ML model detection rates, something not considered in the majority of the literature work. In this work, we evaluate the impact of concept drift on malware classifiers for two Android datasets: DREBIN (about 130K apps) and a subset of AndroZoo (about 285K apps). We used these datasets to train an Adaptive Random Forest (ARF) classifier, as well as a Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) classifier. We also ordered all datasets samples using their VirusTotal submission timestamp and then extracted features from their textual attributes using two algorithms (Word2Vec and TF-IDF). Then, we conducted experiments comparing both feature extractors, classifiers, as well as four drift detectors (DDM, EDDM, ADWIN, and KSWIN) to determine the best approach for real environments. Finally, we compare some possible approaches to mitigate concept drift and propose a novel data stream pipeline that updates both the classifier and the feature extractor. To do so, we conducted a longitudinal evaluation by (i) classifying malware samples collected over nine years (2009-2018), (ii) reviewing concept drift detection algorithms to attest its pervasiveness, (iii) comparing distinct ML approaches to mitigate the issue, and (iv) proposing an ML data stream pipeline that outperformed literature approaches.