A Feasibility Study on Evasion Attacks Against NLP-Based Macro Malware Detection Algorithms

Abstract

Machine learning-based models for malware detection have gained prominence in order to detect obfuscated malware. These models extract malicious features and endeavor to classify samples as either malware or benign entities. Conversely, these benign features can be employed to imitate benign samples. With respect to Android applications, numerous researchers have assessed the hazard and tackled the problem. This evasive technique can be extended to other malicious scripts, such as macro malware. In this paper, we investigate the potential for evasive attacks against natural language processing (NLP)-based macro malware detection algorithms. We assess three language models as methods for feature extraction: Bag of Words, Latent Semantic Analysis, and Paragraph Vector. Our experimental result demonstrates that the detection rate declines to 2 percent when benign features are inserted into actual macro malware. This approach is effective even against advanced language models.

Keywords

• Macro malware
• machine learning
• evasion attack
• LSA
• paragraph vector