Towards Light-weight Deep Learning based Malware Detection

The explosive amount of malware continues threating the security of operating systems and networks. Traditional malware detection approaches fail to meet the requirements of detecting polymorphic and new samples. Existing neural network based detection approaches performs better, but consuming much more time in both feature extraction and training. In this paper, we propose a light-weight PC malware detection system which is based on deep convolutional neural network (CNN). The raw inputs of our system are sequences of grouped instructions, which were generated by our Instruction Analyzer in according to different functionalities of the instructions. The network will automatically learn features of malware from the grouped instruction sequences. The experiment results suggest that in a large dataset which contains roughly 70,000 samples, our detection system can achieve an overall accuracy of 95%. The training time of our system with single convolutional layer was only about 10 hours, which is one order of magnitude less than traditional methods.