Malware Variants Detection Model Based on MFF–HDBA

Abstract

A massive proliferation of malware variants has posed serious and evolving threats to cybersecurity. Developing intelligent methods to cope with the situation is highly necessary due to the inefficiency of traditional methods. In this paper, a highly efficient, intelligent vision-based malware variants detection method was proposed. Firstly, a bilinear interpolation algorithm was utilized for malware image normalization, and data augmentation was used to resolve the issue of imbalanced malware data sets. Moreover, the paper improved the convolutional neural network (CNN) model by combining multi-scale feature fusion (MFF) and channel attention mechanism for more discriminative and robust feature extraction. Finally, we proposed a hyperparameter optimization algorithm based on the bat algorithm, referred to as HDBA, in order to overcome the disadvantage of the traditional hyperparameter optimization method based on manual adjustment. Experimental results indicated that our model can effectively and efficiently identify malware variants from real and daily networks, with better performance than state-of-the-art solutions.

Keywords

• malware variant detection
• convolutional neural network
• multi-scale feature fusion
• channel attention mechanism
• discrete bat algorithm