Falcon: Malware Detection and Categorization with Network Traffic Images

Peng Xu, Claudia Eckert, Apostolis Zarras

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

9 Scopus citations

Abstract

Android is the most popular smartphone operating system. At the same time, miscreants have already created malicious apps to find new victims and infect them. Unfortunately, existing anti-malware procedures have become obsolete, and thus novel Android malware techniques are in high demand. In this paper, we present Falcon, an Android malware detection and categorization framework. More specifically, we treat the network traffic classification task as a 2D image sequence classification and handle each network packet as a 2D image. Furthermore, we use a bidirectional LSTM network to process the converted 2D images to obtain the network vectors. We then utilize those converted vectors to detect and categorize the malware. Our results reveal that Falcon could be an accurate and viable solution as we get 97.16% accuracy on average for the malware detection and 88.32% accuracy for the malware categorization.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationArtificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning – ICANN 2021 - 30th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, Proceedings
EditorsIgor Farkaš, Paolo Masulli, Sebastian Otte, Stefan Wermter
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages117-128
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)9783030863616
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Event30th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 14 Sep 202117 Sep 2021

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12891 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference30th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period14/09/2117/09/21

Keywords

  • 2D image sequence classification
  • Bi-directional LSTM
  • Malware categorization
  • Malware detection

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