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Can You See Me? On the Visibility of NOPs Against Android Malware Detectors (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Jan 9, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A score rates how hard it is to spot fake no-op code attackers add to Android apps to fool malware detectors. Tested on attacks against a detector, it revealed a trade-off between how well an attack dodges detection and how easy its code is to spot.

Abstract · Can you See me? On the Visibility of NOPs against Android Malware Detectors

Android malware still represents the most significant threat to mobile systems. While Machine Learning systems are increasingly used to identify these threats, past studies have revealed that attackers can bypass these detection mechanisms by making subtle changes to Android applications, such as adding specific API calls. These modifications are often referred to as No OPerations (NOP), which ideally should not alter the semantics of the program. However, many NOPs can be spotted and eliminated by refining the app analysis process. This paper proposes a visibility metric that assesses the difficulty in spotting NOPs and similar non-operational codes. We tested our metric on a state-of-the-art, opcode-based deep learning system for Android malware detection. We implemented attacks on the feature and problem spaces and calculated their visibility according to our metric. The attained results show an intriguing trade-off between evasion efficacy and detectability: our metric can be valuable to ensure the real effectiveness of an adversarial attack, also serving as a useful aid to develop better defenses.

Diego Soi, Davide Maiorca, Giorgio Giacinto, Harel Berger
arXiv:2312.17356 · cs.CR · submitted Dec 28, 2023
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