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Register a new userMalware Evasion Attack and Defense
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Added by
Yonghong Huang Ph.D.
Publication date
2019
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Machine learning (ML) classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial examples. An adversarial example is an input sample which is slightly modified to induce misclassification in an ML classifier. In this work, we investigate white-box and grey-box evasion attacks to an ML-based malware detector and conduct performance evaluations in a real-world setting. We compare the defense approaches in mitigating the attacks. We propose a framework for deploying grey-box and black-box attacks to malware detection systems.
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Malware remains a big threat to cyber security, calling for machine learning based malware detection. While promising, such detectors are known to be vulnerable to evasion attacks. Ensemble learning typically facilitates countermeasures, while attackers can leverage this technique to improve attack effectiveness as well. This motivates us to investigate which kind of robustness the ensemble defense or effectiveness the ensemble attack can achieve, particularly when they combat with each other. We thus propose a new attack approach, named mixture of attacks, by rendering attackers capable of multiple generative methods and multiple manipulation sets, to perturb a malware example without ruining its malicious functionality. This naturally leads to a new instantiation of adversarial training, which is further geared to enhancing the ensemble of deep neural networks. We evaluate defenses using Android malware detectors against 26 different attacks upon two practical datasets. Experimental results show that the new adversarial training significantly enhances the robustness of deep neural networks against a wide range of attacks, ensemble methods promote the robustness when base classifiers are robust enough, and yet ensemble attacks can evade the enhanced malware detectors effectively, even notably downgrading the VirusTotal service.
Background: Over the year, Machine Learning Phishing URL classification (MLPU) systems have gained tremendous popularity to detect phishing URLs proactively. Despite this vogue, the security vulnerabilities of MLPUs remain mostly unknown. Aim: To address this concern, we conduct a study to understand the test time security vulnerabilities of the state-of-the-art MLPU systems, aiming at providing guidelines for the future development of these systems. Method: In this paper, we propose an evasion attack framework against MLPU systems. To achieve this, we first develop an algorithm to generate adversarial phishing URLs. We then reproduce 41 MLPU systems and record their baseline performance. Finally, we simulate an evasion attack to evaluate these MLPU systems against our generated adversarial URLs. Results: In comparison to previous works, our attack is: (i) effective as it evades all the models with an average success rate of 66% and 85% for famous (such as Netflix, Google) and less popular phishing targets (e.g., Wish, JBHIFI, Officeworks) respectively; (ii) realistic as it requires only 23ms to produce a new adversarial URL variant that is available for registration with a median cost of only $11.99/year. We also found that popular online services such as Google SafeBrowsing and VirusTotal are unable to detect these URLs. (iii) We find that Adversarial training (successful defence against evasion attack) does not significantly improve the robustness of these systems as it decreases the success rate of our attack by only 6% on average for all the models. (iv) Further, we identify the security vulnerabilities of the considered MLPU systems. Our findings lead to promising directions for future research. Conclusion: Our study not only illustrate vulnerabilities in MLPU systems but also highlights implications for future study towards assessing and improving these systems.
Machine learning-based systems for malware detection operate in a hostile environment. Consequently, adversaries will also target the learning system and use evasion attacks to bypass the detection of malware. In this paper, we outline our learning-based system PEberus that got the first place in the defender challenge of the Microsoft Evasion Competition, resisting a variety of attacks from independent attackers. Our system combines multiple, diverse defenses: we address the semantic gap, use various classification models, and apply a stateful defense. This competition gives us the unique opportunity to examine evasion attacks under a realistic scenario. It also highlights that existing machine learning methods can be hardened against attacks by thoroughly analyzing the attack surface and implementing concepts from adversarial learning. Our defense can serve as an additional baseline in the future to strengthen the research on secure learning.
Malware scanners try to protect users from opening malicious documents by statically or dynamically analyzing documents. However, malware developers may apply evasions that conceal the maliciousness of a document. Given the variety of existing evasions, systematically assessing the impact of evasions on malware scanners remains an open challenge. This paper presents a novel methodology for testing the capability of malware scanners to cope with evasions. We apply the methodology to malicious Portable Document Format (PDF) documents and present an in-depth study of how current PDF evasions affect 41 state-of-the-art malware scanners. The study is based on a framework for creating malicious PDF documents that use one or more evasions. Based on such documents, we measure how effective different evasions are at concealing the maliciousness of a document. We find that many static and dynamic scanners can be easily fooled by relatively simple evasions and that the effectiveness of different evasions varies drastically. Our work not only is a call to arms for improving current malware scanners, but by providing a large-scale corpus of malicious PDF documents with evasions, we directly support the development of improved tools to detect document-based malware. Moreover, our methodology paves the way for a quantitative evaluation of evasions in other kinds of malware.
As a new programming paradigm, deep learning has expanded its application to many real-world problems. At the same time, deep learning based software are found to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Though various defense mechanisms have been proposed to improve robustness of deep learning software, many of them are ineffective against adaptive attacks. In this work, we propose a novel characterization to distinguish adversarial examples from benign ones based on the observation that adversarial examples are significantly less robust than benign ones. As existing robustness measurement does not scale to large networks, we propose a novel defense framework, named attack as defense (A2D), to detect adversarial examples by effectively evaluating an examples robustness. A2D uses the cost of attacking an input for robustness evaluation and identifies those less robust examples as adversarial since less robust examples are easier to attack. Extensive experiment results on MNIST, CIFAR10 and ImageNet show that A2D is more effective than recent promising approaches. We also evaluate our defence against potential adaptive attacks and show that A2D is effective in defending carefully designed adaptive attacks, e.g., the attack success rate drops to 0% on CIFAR10.
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