Neural Encrypted State Transduction for Ransomware Classification: A Novel Approach Using Cryptographic Flow Residuals

TL;DR

This paper introduces NEST, a neural transduction framework analyzing cryptographic flow residuals to classify ransomware effectively without decrypting execution traces, demonstrating high accuracy and robustness against obfuscation techniques.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel neural encrypted state transduction method that improves ransomware detection by analyzing encrypted flow residuals, resilient to evasion tactics and obfuscation.

Findings

Achieves higher detection accuracy across multiple ransomware families.

Demonstrates robustness against adversarial perturbations and unseen variants.

Maintains efficient processing suitable for large-scale deployment.

Abstract

Encrypted behavioral patterns provide a unique avenue for classifying complex digital threats without reliance on explicit feature extraction, enabling detection frameworks to remain effective even when conventional static and behavioral methodologies fail. A novel approach based on Neural Encrypted State Transduction (NEST) is introduced to analyze cryptographic flow residuals and classify threats through their encrypted state transitions, mitigating evasion tactics employed through polymorphic and obfuscated attack strategies. The mathematical formulation of NEST leverages transduction principles to map state transitions dynamically, enabling high-confidence classification without requiring direct access to decrypted execution traces. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves improved detection accuracy across multiple ransomware families while exhibiting resilience against adversarial perturbations and previously unseen attack variants. The model maintains competitive processing efficiency, offering a practical balance between classification performance and computational resource constraints, making it suitable for large-scale security deployments. Comparative assessments reveal that NEST consistently outperforms baseline classification models, particularly in detecting ransomware samples employing delayed encryption, entropy-based obfuscation, and memory-resident execution techniques. The capacity to generalize across diverse execution environments reinforces the applicability of encrypted transduction methodologies in adversarial classification tasks beyond conventional malware detection pipelines. The integration of residual learning mechanisms within the transduction layers further enhances classification robustness, minimizing both false positives and misclassification rates across varied operational contexts.