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technical-note

On the appropriateness of evolutionary rule learning algorithms for malware detection

Published: 08 July 2009 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of ten well-known evolutionary and non-evolutionary rule learning algorithms. The comparative study is performed on a real-world classification problem of detecting malicious executables. The executable dataset, used in this study, consists of 189 attributes which are statically extracted from the executables of Microsoft Windows operating system. In our study, we compare the performance of rule learning algorithms with respect to four metrics: (1) classification accuracy, (2) the number of rules in the developed rule set, (3) the comprehensibility of the generated rules, and (4) the processing overhead of the rule learning process. The results of our comparative study suggest that evolutionary rule learning classifiers cannot be deployed in real-world malware detection systems.

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Cited By

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  • (2017)Feature Creation Using Genetic Algorithms for Zero False Positive Malware ClassificationEVOLVE - A Bridge between Probability, Set Oriented Numerics, and Evolutionary Computation VI10.1007/978-3-319-69710-9_6(82-93)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2017
  • (2016)Generating behavior-based malware detection models with genetic programming2016 14th Annual Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST)10.1109/PST.2016.7907008(506-511)Online publication date: Dec-2016
  • (2015)Feature Extraction Using Genetic Programming with Applications in Malware DetectionProceedings of the 2015 17th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (SYNASC)10.1109/SYNASC.2015.43(224-231)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2015
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
GECCO '09: Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference Companion on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference: Late Breaking Papers
July 2009
1760 pages
ISBN:9781605585055
DOI:10.1145/1570256
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 08 July 2009

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Author Tags

  1. genetics based machine learning
  2. learning classifier systems
  3. malware detection

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  • Technical-note

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GECCO09
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GECCO09: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
July 8 - 12, 2009
Québec, Montreal, Canada

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,669 of 4,410 submissions, 38%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2017)Feature Creation Using Genetic Algorithms for Zero False Positive Malware ClassificationEVOLVE - A Bridge between Probability, Set Oriented Numerics, and Evolutionary Computation VI10.1007/978-3-319-69710-9_6(82-93)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2017
  • (2016)Generating behavior-based malware detection models with genetic programming2016 14th Annual Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST)10.1109/PST.2016.7907008(506-511)Online publication date: Dec-2016
  • (2015)Feature Extraction Using Genetic Programming with Applications in Malware DetectionProceedings of the 2015 17th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (SYNASC)10.1109/SYNASC.2015.43(224-231)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2015
  • (2014)Evolutionary algorithms for classification of malware families through different network behaviorsProceedings of the 2014 Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation10.1145/2576768.2598238(1167-1174)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2014
  • (2011)Adaptive Rule-Based Malware Detection Employing Learning Classifier SystemsProceedings of the 2011 IEEE 35th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference Workshops10.1109/COMPSACW.2011.28(110-115)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2011
  • (2010)Malware detection based on dependency graph using hybrid genetic algorithmProceedings of the 12th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation10.1145/1830483.1830703(1211-1218)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2010

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