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Improving Robustness in IoT Malware Detection through Execution Order Analysis

Published: 26 September 2024 Publication History

Abstract

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has significantly increased the prevalence of malware targeting IoT devices. Although machine learning models offer promising solutions for automatic malware detection, they are increasingly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. These attacks exploit the model’s feedback loop to iteratively refine malware, producing adversarial samples that evade detection. As such, enhancing the robustness of these models is of paramount importance. Our research introduces a novel approach to bolster malware detection by retaining additional semantic information within the execution order analysis of malware programs. The method significantly improves the resilience of detection models against adversarial samples and implements two adversarial attack methods to rigorously test our model’s robustness by generating authentic adversarial examples for validation. We highlight the critical impact of preserving semantic integrity in malware detection and present a solution to counteract the growing threat of adversarial attacks in IoT environments.

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems  Volume 24, Issue 1
January 2025
325 pages
EISSN:1558-3465
DOI:10.1145/3696805
Issue’s Table of Contents

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Publication History

Published: 26 September 2024
Online AM: 26 August 2024
Accepted: 29 July 2024
Revised: 28 July 2024
Received: 07 January 2024
Published in TECS Volume 24, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Execution order
  2. malware detector
  3. machine learning
  4. deep learning
  5. detector robustness

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  • Research-article

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  • National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), Taiwan

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