Mate! Are You Really Aware? An Explainability-Guided Testing Framework for Robustness of Malware Detectors
Numerous open-source and commercial malware detectors are available. However, their efficacy is threatened by new adversarial attacks, whereby malware attempts to evade detection, e.g., by performing feature-space manipulation. In this work, we propose an explainability-guided and model-agnostic testing framework for robustness of malware detectors when confronted with adversarial attacks. The framework introduces the concept of Accrued Malicious Magnitude (AMM) to identify which malware features could be manipulated to maximize the likelihood of evading detection. We then use this framework to test several state-of-the-art malware detectors’ ability to detect manipulated malware. We find that (i) commercial antivirus engines are vulnerable to AMM-guided test cases; (ii) the ability of a manipulated malware generated using one detector to evade detection by another detector (i.e., transferability) depends on the overlap of features with large AMM values between the different detectors; and (iii) AMM values effectively measure the fragility of features (i.e., capability of feature-space manipulation to flip the prediction results) and explain the robustness of malware detectors facing evasion attacks. Our findings shed light on the limitations of current malware detectors, as well as how they can be improved.
Thu 7 DecDisplayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change
14:00 - 15:30 | Security IIResearch Papers / Journal First at Golden Gate C3 Chair(s): Caroline Lemieux University of British Columbia | ||
14:00 15mTalk | Mate! Are You Really Aware? An Explainability-Guided Testing Framework for Robustness of Malware Detectors Research Papers Ruoxi Sun CSIRO's Data61, Jason Minhui Xue CSIRO’s Data61, Gareth Tyson Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Tian Dong Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shaofeng Li Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shuo Wang CSIRO's Data61, Haojin Zhu Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Seyit Camtepe CSIRO Data61, Surya Nepal CSIRO’s Data61 Media Attached | ||
14:15 15mTalk | Security Misconfigurations in Open Source Kubernetes Manifests: An Empirical Study Journal First Akond Rahman Auburn University, USA, Shazibul Islam Shamim Auburn University, Dibyendu Brinto Bose Virginia Tech, Rahul Pandita GitHub, Inc. Media Attached | ||
14:30 15mTalk | Crystallizer: A Hybrid Path Analysis Framework To Aid in Uncovering Deserialization Vulnerabilities Research Papers Prashast Srivastava Columbia University, USA, Flavio Toffalini EPFL, Kostyantyn Vorobyov Oracle Labs, Australia, François Gauthier Oracle Labs, Antonio Bianchi Purdue University, Mathias Payer EPFL Media Attached | ||
14:45 15mTalk | Neural Transfer Learning for Repairing Security Vulnerabilities in C Code Journal First Zimin Chen KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Steve Kommrusch Leela AI, Martin Monperrus KTH Royal Institute of Technology Media Attached | ||
15:00 15mTalk | ViaLin: Path-Aware Dynamic Taint Analysis for Android Research Papers Khaled Ahmed University of British Columbia (UBC), Yingying Wang University of British Columbia, Mieszko Lis The University of British Columbia, Canada, Julia Rubin University of British Columbia, Canada Media Attached | ||
15:15 15mTalk | [Remote] Distinguishing Look-Alike Innocent and Vulnerable Code by Subtle Semantic Representation Learning and Explanation Research Papers Chao Ni School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University, Xin Yin The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University, Kaiwen Yang College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Dehai Zhao Australian National University, Australia, Zhenchang Xing Data61, Xin Xia Huawei Technologies Media Attached |