{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/evaluating-the-robustness-of-adversarial","title":"Evaluating the Robustness of Adversarial Defenses in Malware Detection Systems","arxiv_id":"2505.09342","date":"2025-05-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Mostafa Jafari","Alireza Shameli-Sendi"],"abstract":"Machine learning is a key tool for Android malware detection, effectively identifying malicious patterns in apps. However, ML-based detectors are vulnerable to evasion attacks, where small, crafted changes bypass detection. Despite progress in adversarial defenses, the lack of comprehensive evaluation frameworks in binary-constrained domains limits understanding of their robustness. We introduce two key contributions. First, Prioritized Binary Rounding, a technique to convert continuous perturbations into binary feature spaces while preserving high attack success and low perturbation size. Second, the sigma-binary attack, a novel adversarial method for binary domains, designed to achieve attack goals with minimal feature changes. Experiments on the Malscan dataset show that sigma-binary outperforms existing attacks and exposes key vulnerabilities in state-of-the-art defenses. Defenses equipped with adversary detectors, such as KDE, DLA, DNN+, and ICNN, exhibit significant brittleness, with attack success rates exceeding 90% using fewer than 10 feature modifications and reaching 100% with just 20. Adversarially trained defenses, including AT-rFGSM-k, AT-MaxMA, improves robustness under small budgets but remains vulnerable to unrestricted perturbations, with attack success rates of 99.45% and 96.62%, respectively. Although PAD-SMA demonstrates strong robustness against state-of-the-art gradient-based adversarial attacks by maintaining an attack success rate below 16.55%, the sigma-binary attack significantly outperforms these methods, achieving a 94.56% success rate under unrestricted perturbations. These findings highlight the critical need for precise method like sigma-binary to expose hidden vulnerabilities in existing defenses and support the development of more resilient malware detection systems.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09342v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09342v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"evaluating-the-robustness-of-adversarial","repo_url":"https://github.com/mostafa-ja/sigma-binary","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"adversarial-attack","task_name":"Adversarial Attack"},{"task_slug":"adversarial-robustness","task_name":"Adversarial Robustness"},{"task_slug":"android-malware-detection","task_name":"Android Malware Detection"},{"task_slug":"malware-detection","task_name":"Malware Detection"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"dla","method_name":"DLA"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}