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### On Defending Against Label Flipping Attacks on Malware Detection Systems

Label manipulation attacks are a subclass of data poisoning attacks in adversarial machine learning used against different applications, such as malware detection. These types of attacks represent a serious threat to detection systems in environments having high noise rate or uncertainty, such as complex networks and Internet of Thing (IoT). Recent work in the literature has suggested using the $K$-Nearest Neighboring (KNN) algorithm to defend against such attacks. However, such an approach can suffer from low to wrong detection accuracy. In this paper, we design an architecture to tackle the Android malware detection problem in IoT systems. We develop an attack mechanism based on Silhouette clustering method, modified for mobile Android platforms. We proposed two Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-type deep learning algorithms against this \emph{Silhouette Clustering-based Label Flipping Attack (SCLFA)}. We show the effectiveness of these two defense algorithms - \emph{Label-based Semi-supervised Defense (LSD)} and \emph{clustering-based Semi-supervised Defense (CSD)} - in correcting labels being attacked. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms by varying the various machine learning parameters on three Android datasets: Drebin, Contagio, and Genome and three types of features: API, intent, and permission. Our evaluation shows that using random forest feature selection and varying ratios of features can result in an improvement of up to 19\% accuracy when compared with the state-of-the-art method in the literature.

### OFEI: A Semi-black-box Android Adversarial Sample Attack Framework Against DLaaS

With the growing popularity of Android devices, Android malware is seriously threatening the safety of users. Although such threats can be detected by deep learning as a service (DLaaS), deep neural networks as the weakest part of DLaaS are often deceived by the adversarial samples elaborated by attackers. In this paper, we propose a new semi-black-box attack framework called one-feature-each-iteration (OFEI) to craft Android adversarial samples. This framework modifies as few features as possible and requires less classifier information to fool the classifier. We conduct a controlled experiment to evaluate our OFEI framework by comparing it with the benchmark methods JSMF, GenAttack and pointwise attack. The experimental results show that our OFEI has a higher misclassification rate of 98.25%. Furthermore, OFEI can extend the traditional white-box attack methods in the image field, such as fast gradient sign method (FGSM) and DeepFool, to craft adversarial samples for Android. Finally, to enhance the security of DLaaS, we use two uncertainties of the Bayesian neural network to construct the combined uncertainty, which is used to detect adversarial samples and achieves a high detection rate of 99.28%.

### Similarity-based Android Malware Detection Using Hamming Distance of Static Binary Features

In this paper, we develop four malware detection methods using Hamming distance to find similarity between samples which are first nearest neighbors (FNN), all nearest neighbors (ANN), weighted all nearest neighbors (WANN), and k-medoid based nearest neighbors (KMNN). In our proposed methods, we can trigger the alarm if we detect an Android app is malicious. Hence, our solutions help us to avoid the spread of detected malware on a broader scale. We provide a detailed description of the proposed detection methods and related algorithms. We include an extensive analysis to asses the suitability of our proposed similarity-based detection methods. In this way, we perform our experiments on three datasets, including benign and malware Android apps like Drebin, Contagio, and Genome. Thus, to corroborate the actual effectiveness of our classifier, we carry out performance comparisons with some state-of-the-art classification and malware detection algorithms, namely Mixed and Separated solutions, the program dissimilarity measure based on entropy (PDME) and the FalDroid algorithms. We test our experiments in a different type of features: API, intent, and permission features on these three datasets. The results confirm that accuracy rates of proposed algorithms are more than 90% and in some cases (i.e., considering API features) are more than 99%, and are comparable with existing state-of-the-art solutions.

### Explaining Black-box Android Malware Detection

Machine-learning models have been recently used for detecting malicious Android applications, reporting impressive performances on benchmark datasets, even when trained only on features statically extracted from the application, such as system calls and permissions. However, recent findings have highlighted the fragility of such in-vitro evaluations with benchmark datasets, showing that very few changes to the content of Android malware may suffice to evade detection. How can we thus trust that a malware detector performing well on benchmark data will continue to do so when deployed in an operating environment? To mitigate this issue, the most popular Android malware detectors use linear, explainable machine-learning models to easily identify the most influential features contributing to each decision. In this work, we generalize this approach to any black-box machine- learning model, by leveraging a gradient-based approach to identify the most influential local features. This enables using nonlinear models to potentially increase accuracy without sacrificing interpretability of decisions. Our approach also highlights the global characteristics learned by the model to discriminate between benign and malware applications. Finally, as shown by our empirical analysis on a popular Android malware detection task, it also helps identifying potential vulnerabilities of linear and nonlinear models against adversarial manipulations.

### Robust Android Malware Detection System against Adversarial Attacks using Q-Learning

The current state-of-the-art Android malware detection systems are based on machine learning and deep learning models. Despite having superior performance, these models are susceptible to adversarial attacks. Therefore in this paper, we developed eight Android malware detection models based on machine learning and deep neural network and investigated their robustness against adversarial attacks. For this purpose, we created new variants of malware using Reinforcement Learning, which will be misclassified as benign by the existing Android malware detection models. We propose two novel attack strategies, namely single policy attack and multiple policy attack using reinforcement learning for white-box and grey-box scenario respectively. Putting ourselves in the adversary's shoes, we designed adversarial attacks on the detection models with the goal of maximizing fooling rate, while making minimum modifications to the Android application and ensuring that the app's functionality and behavior do not change. We achieved an average fooling rate of 44.21% and 53.20% across all the eight detection models with a maximum of five modifications using a single policy attack and multiple policy attack, respectively. The highest fooling rate of 86.09% with five changes was attained against the decision tree-based model using the multiple policy approach. Finally, we propose an adversarial defense strategy that reduces the average fooling rate by threefold to 15.22% against a single policy attack, thereby increasing the robustness of the detection models i.e. the proposed model can effectively detect variants (metamorphic) of malware. The experimental analysis shows that our proposed Android malware detection system using reinforcement learning is more robust against adversarial attacks.