Explainability-Guided Adversarial Attacks on Transformer-Based Malware Detectors Using Control Flow Graphs
For security practitioners deploying transformer-based malware detectors, this work reveals that explainability mechanisms can be exploited to craft effective evasion attacks, highlighting a critical vulnerability.
This paper proposes a white-box adversarial attack on a RoBERTa-based malware detector that uses control flow graphs, achieving misclassification by perturbing influential graph components identified via integrated gradients. The attack reliably evades detection on both small- and large-scale Windows PE datasets.
Transformer-based malware detection systems operating on graph modalities such as control flow graphs (CFGs) achieve strong performance by modeling structural relationships in program behavior. However, their robustness to adversarial evasion attacks remains underexplored. This paper examines the vulnerability of a RoBERTa-based malware detector that linearizes CFGs into sequences of function calls, a design choice that enables transformer modeling but may introduce token-level sensitivities and ordering artifacts exploitable by adversaries. By evaluating evasion strategies within this graph-to-sequence framework, we provide insight into the practical robustness of transformer-based malware detectors beyond aggregate detection accuracy. This paper proposes a white-box adversarial evasion attack that leverages explainability mechanisms to identify and perturb most influential graph components. Using token- and word-level attributions derived from integrated gradients, the attack iteratively replaces positively attributed function calls with synthetic external imports, producing adversarial CFG representations without altering overall program structure. Experimental evaluation on small- and large-scale Windows Portable Executable (PE) datasets demonstrates that the proposed method can reliably induce misclassification, even against models trained to high accuracy. Our results highlight that explainability tools, while valuable for interpretability, can also expose critical attack surfaces in transformer-based malware detectors.