Papers › PAD: Towards Principled Adversarial Malware Detection Against Evasion Attacks
PAD: Towards Principled Adversarial Malware Detection Against Evasion Attacks
Deqiang Li, Shicheng Cui, Yun Li, Jia Xu, Fu Xiao, Shouhuai Xu
Machine Learning (ML) techniques can facilitate the automation of malicious software (malware for short) detection, but suffer from evasion attacks. Many studies counter such attacks in heuristic manners, lacking theoretical guarantees and defense effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a new adversarial training framework, termed Principled Adversarial Malware Detection (PAD), which offers convergence guarantees for robust optimization methods. PAD lays on a learnable convex measurement that quantifies distribution-wise discrete perturbations to protect malware detectors from adversaries, whereby for smooth detectors, adversarial training can be performed with theoretical treatments. To promote defense effectiveness, we propose a new mixture of attacks to instantiate PAD to enhance deep neural network-based measurements and malware detectors. Experimental results on two Android malware datasets demonstrate: (i) the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art defenses; (ii) it can harden ML-based malware detection against 27 evasion attacks with detection accuracies greater than 83.45%, at the price of suffering an accuracy decrease smaller than 2.16% in the absence of attacks; (iii) it matches or outperforms many anti-malware scanners in VirusTotal against realistic adversarial malware.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections