Malware Classification Using Attention-Based Transductive Learning Network.

Malware has now grown up to be one of the most important threats in the internet security. As the number of malware families has increased rapidly, a malware classification model needs to classify the samples from emerging malware families. In real-world environment, the number of malware samples varies greatly with each family and some malware families only have a few samples. Therefore, it is a challenge task to obtain a malware classification model with strong generalization ability by using only a few labeled malware samples in each family. In this paper, we propose an attention-based transductive learning approach to tackle this problem. To extract features from raw malware binaries, our approach first converts them into gray-scale images. After visualization, an embedding function is used to encode the images into feature maps. Then we build an attention-based Gaussian similarity graph to help transduct the label information from well-labeled instances to unknown instances. With end-to-end training, we validate our attention-based transductive learning network on a malware database of 11,236 samples with 30 different malware families Comparing with state-of-the-art approaches, the experimental results show that our approach achieves a better performance.