Towards resilient machine learning for ransomware detection

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the resilience of machine learning-based ransomware detection methods by using GANs to generate malicious features, revealing vulnerabilities and emphasizing the need for more robust defenses.

Contribution

It introduces a novel case study using GANs to test the robustness of ransomware classifiers and analyzes the reasons behind their performance degradation.

Findings

GAN-generated samples resemble real ransomware statistically

GAN samples can degrade classifier performance

Highlights the need for more resilient ML security models

Abstract

There has been a surge of interest in using machine learning (ML) to automatically detect malware through their dynamic behaviors. These approaches have achieved significant improvement in detection rates and lower false positive rates at large scale compared with traditional malware analysis methods. ML in threat detection has demonstrated to be a good cop to guard platform security. However it is imperative to evaluate - is ML-powered security resilient enough? In this paper, we juxtapose the resiliency and trustworthiness of ML algorithms for security, via a case study of evaluating the resiliency of ransomware detection via the generative adversarial network (GAN). In this case study, we propose to use GAN to automatically produce dynamic features that exhibit generalized malicious behaviors that can reduce the efficacy of black-box ransomware classifiers. We examine the quality of the GAN-generated samples by comparing the statistical similarity of these samples to real ransomware and benign software. Further we investigate the latent subspace where the GAN-generated samples lie and explore reasons why such samples cause a certain class of ransomware classifiers to degrade in performance. Our focus is to emphasize necessary defense improvement in ML-based approaches for ransomware detection before deployment in the wild. Our results and discoveries should pose relevant questions for defenders such as how ML models can be made more resilient for robust enforcement of security objectives.