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We cannot trust in you: a study about the dissonance among anti-malware engines.

Published: 23 August 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The impressive volume of malware circulating today, the increase in its sophistication, its unpredictability and evasiveness pose new problems to face in the deployment of effective defence systems. It is proven today that no single anti-malware solution could be universally effective in protecting from all threats due to its inherent inaccuracy. Different anti-malware solutions could produce analyses that may significantly vary, in terms of both detection rate (not all are able to recognize the same malware) and classification (not all assign the same family name to the same malware). In this study we realize a quantitative analysis of the dissonance among anti-malware solutions commonly used in the marketplace and widely deployed in real world with the aim of evaluating the classification inaccuracies. We carried out this evaluation on two datasets: one comprising 103,073 malware updated to 2020/10/03 from the MalwareBazaar repository; the other composed of 100k malware extracted from EMBER dataset. Our results show that there is a large disagreement in classification and the uncertainty about type and family identification is still high.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Optimal Weighted Voting-Based Collaborated Malware Detection for Zero-Day Malware: A Case Study on VirusTotal and MalwareBazaarFuture Internet10.3390/fi1608025916:8(259)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2024
  • (2024)MalFusion: Simple String Manipulations Confuse Malware Detection2024 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking)10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619782(113-121)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2023)PHOENIX: A Cloud-based Framework for Ensemble Malware Detection2023 21st Mediterranean Communication and Computer Networking Conference (MedComNet)10.1109/MedComNet58619.2023.10168868(11-14)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2023
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ARES '22: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
August 2022
1371 pages
ISBN:9781450396707
DOI:10.1145/3538969
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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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 August 2022

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Author Tags

  1. anti-malware classification accuracy
  2. detection rate
  3. malware detectors performance
  4. multiclassification

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ARES 2022

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Overall Acceptance Rate 228 of 451 submissions, 51%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Optimal Weighted Voting-Based Collaborated Malware Detection for Zero-Day Malware: A Case Study on VirusTotal and MalwareBazaarFuture Internet10.3390/fi1608025916:8(259)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2024
  • (2024)MalFusion: Simple String Manipulations Confuse Malware Detection2024 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking)10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619782(113-121)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2023)PHOENIX: A Cloud-based Framework for Ensemble Malware Detection2023 21st Mediterranean Communication and Computer Networking Conference (MedComNet)10.1109/MedComNet58619.2023.10168868(11-14)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2023
  • (2023)A technical characterization of APTs by leveraging public resourcesInternational Journal of Information Security10.1007/s10207-023-00706-x22:6(1567-1584)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2023

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