AIMED-RL: Exploring Adversarial Malware Examples with Reinforcement Learning

Machine learning models have been widely implemented to classify software. These models allow to generalize static features of Windows portable executable files. While highly accurate in terms of classification, they still exhibit weaknesses that can be exploited by applying subtle transformations to the input object. Despite their semantic-preserving nature, such transformations can render the file corrupt. Hence, unlike in the computer vision domain, integrity verification is vital to the generation of adversarial malware examples. Many approaches have been explored in the literature, however, most of them have either overestimated the semantic-preserving transformations or achieved modest evasion rates across general files. We therefore present AIMED-RL, Automatic Intelligent Malware modifications to Evade Detection using Reinforcement Learning. Our approach is able to generate adversarial examples that lead machine learning models to misclassify malware files, without compromising their functionality. We implement our approach using a Distributional Double Deep Q-Network agent, adding a penalty to improve diversity of transformations. Thereby, we achieve competitive results compared to previous research based on reinforcement learning while minimizing the required sequence of transformations.

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Recommended citation: R. Labaca Castro, S. Franz, G. Dreo Rodosek: AIMED-RL: Exploring Adversarial Malware Examples with Reinforcement Learning. Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD) Bilbao, Spain, September 15, 2021