Towards a Utopia of Dataset Sharing: A Case Study on Machine Learning-based Malware Detection Algorithms

Working with a high-quality (complete and up-to-date) dataset is the key to building a good machine learning model, especially in security research areas. However, it is not easy to collect a good quality dataset for security research communities because of the sensitive property of most security datasets. We believe that having more contributors to share up-to-date samples would increase the quality of datasets. Therefore, this study aims to increase security dataset sharing for research communities by eliminating possible information leakage. We propose a dataset sharing model and the core algorithm, FeatureTransformer, which guarantees no sensitive information leakage from a shared dataset. FeatureTransformer transforms extracted raw features into intermediate features that conceal sensitive information. Meanwhile, models built from transformed features maintain similar performance compared to models built from the original raw features. We show the effectiveness of our model by evaluating FeatureTransformer with typical malware classification problems using (1) traditional machine learning classifiers and (2) neural network-based classifiers. The experiment results show that the models trained with transformed features merely suffer from 2.56% and 1.48% accuracy degradation on the investigated problems. It indicates that models validated by datasets processed by FeatureTransformer work well with the original raw (untransformed) datasets. We believe that our privacy-preserving model can stimulate dataset sharing and advance the development of machine learning approaches in solving security problems.