Microsoft Malware Classification Challenge

TL;DR

The paper discusses the Microsoft Malware Classification Challenge dataset, highlighting its role as a standard benchmark in malware research and providing a comparative analysis of related publications to guide future research directions.

Contribution

It offers a high-level comparison of studies using the dataset, aiding in identifying research trends and future evaluation benchmarks.

Findings

The dataset has been cited in over 50 research papers.

It serves as a standard benchmark for malware behavior modeling.

The paper provides insights into research directions in malware classification.

Abstract

The Microsoft Malware Classification Challenge was announced in 2015 along with a publication of a huge dataset of nearly 0.5 terabytes, consisting of disassembly and bytecode of more than 20K malware samples. Apart from serving in the Kaggle competition, the dataset has become a standard benchmark for research on modeling malware behaviour. To date, the dataset has been cited in more than 50 research papers. Here we provide a high-level comparison of the publications citing the dataset. The comparison simplifies finding potential research directions in this field and future performance evaluation of the dataset.