Deep Learning Model with Sequential Features for Malware Classification

Currently, malware shows an explosive growth trend. Demand for classifying malware is also increasing. The problem is the low accuracy of both malware detection and classification. From the static features of malicious families, a new deep learning method of TCN-BiGRU was proposed in this study, which combined temporal convolutional network (TCN) and bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU). First, we extracted the features of malware assembly code sequences and byte code sequences. Second, we shortened the opcode sequences by TCN to explore the features in the data and then used the BiGRU network to capture the opcode sequences in both directions to achieve deep extraction of the features of the opcode sequences. Finally, the fully connected and softmax layers were used to output predictions of the deep features. Multiple comparisons and ablation experiments demonstrated that the accuracy of malware detection and classification were effectively improved by our method. Our overall performance was 99.72% for samples comprising nine different classes, and our overall performance was 96.54% for samples comprising two different classes.