An Efficient Method for Generating Adversarial Malware Samples

Deep learning methods have been applied to malware detection. However, deep learning algorithms are not safe, which can easily be fooled by adversarial samples. In this paper, we study how to generate malware adversarial samples using deep learning models. Gradient‐based methods are usually used to generate adversarial samples. These methods generate adversarial samples caseby‐case, which is very time‐consuming to generate a large number of adversarial samples. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to generate adversarial malware samples. Different from gradient‐based methods, we extract feature byte sequences from benign samples. Feature byte sequences represent the characteristics of benign samples and can affect classification decision. We directly inject feature byte sequences into malware samples to generate adversarial samples. Feature byte sequences can be shared to produce different adversarial samples, which can efficiently generate a large number of adversarial samples. We compare the proposed method with the randomly injecting and gradient‐based methods. The experimental results show that the adversarial samples generated using our proposed method have a high successful rate.