Homology analysis of malware based on ensemble learning and multifeatures

Abstract

With the exponential increase in malware, homology analysis has become a hot research topic in the malware detection field. This paper proposes MHAS, a malware homology analysis system based on ensemble learning and multifeatures. MHAS generates grayscale images from malware binary files and then uses the opcode tool IDA Pro to extract opcode sequences and system call graphs. Thus, RGB images and M-images are generated on the image matrix. Then, MHAS uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as base learners to perform bagging ensemble learning to learn features from the grayscale images, RGB images and M-images. Next, MHAS integrates the nine base learners using voting, learning and selective ensemble (in that order) and maps the integration results to the result matrix. Finally, the result matrix is again integrated using the learning method to obtain the final malware classification result. To verify the accuracy of MHAS, we performed a malware family classification experiment, that included samples of 10 malware families. The results showed that MHAS can reach an accuracy rate of 99.17%, meaning that it can effectively analyze and identify malware families.