2021/03/03 by Aparna Sunil Kale, Kale, Aparna Sunil, Fabio Di Troia +3 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Advanced Malware Detection Techniques #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Network Security and Intrusion Detection #Spam and Phishing Detection
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2103.02711
openalex publication_date 2021/03/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Malware classification is an important and challenging problem in information security. Modern malware classification techniques rely on machine learning models that can be trained on features such as opcode sequences, API calls, and byte n-grams, among many others. In this research, we consider opcode features. We implement hybrid machine learning techniques, where we engineer feature vectors by training hidden Markov models -- a technique that we refer to as HMM2Vec -- and Word2Vec embeddings on these opcode sequences. The resulting HMM2Vec and Word2Vec embedding vectors are then used as features for classification algorithms. Specifically, we consider support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), random forest (RF), and convolutional neural network (CNN) classifiers. We conduct substantial experiments over a variety of malware families. Our experiments extend well beyond any previous work in this field.