Large-Scale Malicious Software Classification with Fuzzified Features and Boosted Fuzzy Random Forest

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
File version

Accepted Manuscript (AM)

Author(s)
Li, Fangqi
Wang, Shilin
Liew, Alan Wee-Chung
Ding, Weiping
Liu, Gong Shen
Griffith University Author(s)
Primary Supervisor
Other Supervisors
Editor(s)
Date
2020
Size
File type(s)
Location
License
Abstract

Classification of malicious software, especially in a very large dataset, is a challenging task for machine intelligence. Malware can have highly diversified features, each of which has highly heterogeneous distributions. These factors increase the difficulties for traditional data analytic approaches to deal with them. Although deep learning-based methods have reported good classification performance, the deep models usually lack interpretability and are fragile under adversarial attacks. To solve these problems, fuzzy systems have become a competitive candidate in malware analysis. In this paper, a new fuzzy-based approach is proposed for malware classification. We focused on portable executable files in the Windows platform and analyzed the distributions of static features and content-oriented features. Fuzzification was used to reduce the ubiquitous impact of noise and outliers in a very large dataset. Finally, a novel boosted classifier consisted of fuzzy decision trees and support vector machine is proposed to perform the malware classification. By using fuzzy decision trees, the inner structure of the classifier can be readily interpreted as discriminative rules, while the novel boosting strategy provides state-of-the-art classification performance. Extensive experimental results showed that our method significantly outperformed several state-of-the-art classifiers.

Journal Title

IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems

Conference Title
Book Title
Edition
Volume
Issue
Thesis Type
Degree Program
School
Publisher link
Patent number
Funder(s)
Grant identifier(s)
Rights Statement
Rights Statement

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

Item Access Status
Note

This publication has been entered in Griffith Research Online as an advanced online version.

Access the data
Related item(s)
Subject

Artificial intelligence

Applied mathematics

Persistent link to this record
Citation

Li, F; Wang, S; Liew, AW-C; Ding, W; Liu, GS, Large-Scale Malicious Software Classification with Fuzzified Features and Boosted Fuzzy Random Forest, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, 2020

Collections