Augmenting Android Malware Using Conditional Variational Autoencoder for the Malware Family Classification

Data augmentation (DA) increases the diversity of training data to improve the model generalization ability. Most of the DA methods focus on image classification or object detection. Directly using the existing DA methods on change detection tasks not only falls short of fully exploring the specificity of the change image pairs but also leads to longer training times. In this article, we first propose a mask-guided mixing (MGM) DA for change detection, which mixes the change regions of the current training sample based on prediction results and labels to generate high-quality samples with more positive samples. We then propose a new reinforcement learning (RL)-based Adaptive DA method, AdaAug+, to adaptively select the optimal DA policy for the training samples. An actor selects the best augmentation operation from the operation set according to the image pair. The augmented image pairs make it easier for the change detector to learn the optimal parameters and improve the final detection performance. To reduce the training time, we identify and remove the redundant training samples during the training process by our redundancy searching policy. We have conducted various experiments on four remote sensing change detection datasets with different change detectors. The experimental results demonstrate that AdaAug+ achieves promising performance compared to the state-of-the-art DA methods and requires less training time.

Short Message Service (SMS) messaging is very popular, especially among teens. Because research has shown that SMS messaging while driving results in 35% slower reaction time than being intoxicated [7], campaigns have been launched by states, governments and even cell phone carriers to discourage and ban SMS users from messaging while driving [1]. At the same time, automobile automotive infotainment systems such as the Ford Sync [2] now provide drivers the ability to hear incoming messages using text-to-speech (TTS). But how should users respond to these messages while driving in a safe manner?Automatic speech recognition (ASR) affords automobile drivers a hands-free, eyes free method of replying to SMS messages. In [3], we examined three approaches to leveraging ASR for SMS replies: dictation using a language model trained on SMS responses, canned responses using a probabilistic context-free grammar (PCFG), and a approach based on template matching. Voice search proceeds in two steps [6]: an utterance is first converted into text, which is then used as a search query to match the most similar items of an index. For SMS replies, we created an index of SMS response templates, with slots for concepts such as time and place, from a large SMS data collection. After convolving recorded SMS replies so that the audio would exhibit the acoustic characteristics of in-car recognition, they compared how the three approaches handled the convolved audio with respect to the top n-best reply candidates. The voice search approach consistently outperformed dictation and canned responses, achieving as high as 89.7% task completion with respect to the top 5 reply candidates.Even if the voice search approach may be more robust to in-car noise, this does not guarantee that it will be more usable. Indeed, users may have difficulties verifying whether SMS response templates match their intended meaning, especially while driving. Using a high-fidelity driving simulator, in [4] we compared the voice search approach to the dictation approach in terms of both driving performance and task performance measures. Although the two approaches did not differ in terms of driving performance, users made five times more errors on average using dictation than voice search. Hence, verifying whether SMS response templates matched the meaning of an intended reply is much less prone to error than deciphering the sometimes nonsensical misrecognitions of dictation. And as prior research [5] has shown, because ASR errors with in-car speech interfaces negatively impacts driving performance, the safest way to respond to SMS messages in automobiles may just be the voice search approach.For MIAA, we will demonstrate a multimodal interface for SMS replies based on voice search, as shown in Figure 1.

Discriminative feature constraints via supervised contrastive learning for few-shot forest tree species classification using airborne hyperspectral images

With explosive growth of Android malware and due to the severity of its damages to smart phone users, the detection of Android malware has become increasingly important in cybersecurity. The increasing sophistication of Android malware calls for new defensive techniques that are capable against novel threats and harder to evade. In this paper, to detect Android malware, instead of using Application Programming Interface (API) calls only, we further analyze the different relationships between them and create higher-level semantics which require more effort for attackers to evade the detection. We represent the Android applications (apps), related APIs, and their rich relationships as a structured heterogeneous information network (HIN). Then we use a meta-path based approach to characterize the semantic relatedness of apps and APIs. We use each meta-path to formulate a similarity measure over Android apps, and aggregate different similarities using multi-kernel learning. Then each meta-path is automatically weighted by the learning algorithm to make predictions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use structured HIN for Android malware detection. Comprehensive experiments on real sample collections from Comodo Cloud Security Center are conducted to compare various malware detection approaches. Promising experimental results demonstrate that our developed system HinDroid outperforms other alternative Android malware detection techniques.

Data augmentation is widely utilized as an effective technique to enhance the generalization performance of deep models. However, data augmentation may inevitably introduce distribution shifts and noises, which significantly constrain the potential and deteriorate the performance of deep networks. To this end, we propose a novel information-preserving framework, namely IPF-RDA, to enhance the robustness of data augmentations in this paper. IPF-RDA combines the proposal of (i) a new class-discriminative information estimation algorithm that identifies the points most vulnerable to data augmentation operations and corresponding importance scores; And (ii) a new information-preserving scheme that preserves the critical information in the augmented samples and ensures the diversity of augmented data adaptively. We divide data augmentation methods into three categories according to the operation types and integrate these approaches into our framework accordingly. After being integrated into our framework, the robustness of data augmentation methods can be enhanced and their full potential can be unleashed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that although being simple, IPF-RDA consistently improves the performance of numerous commonly used state-of-the-art data augmentation methods with popular deep models on a variety of datasets, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, CUHK03, Market1501, Oxford Flower, and MNIST, where its performance and scalability are stressed.

Despite the growing threat posed by the Android malware, the research community is still lacking a comprehensive view of common behaviors and emerging trends in malware families active on the platform. Without such view, researchers incur the risk of developing systems that only detect outdated threats, missing the most recent ones. In this article, we conduct the largest measurement of Android malware behavior to date, analyzing over 1.2 million malware samples that belong to 1.28K families over a period of eight years (from 2010 to 2017). We aim at understanding how Android malware has evolved over time, focusing on <i>repackaging</i> malware. In this type of threat different innocuous apps are piggybacked with a malicious payload (<i>rider</i>), allowing inexpensive malware manufacturing. One of the main challenges posed when studying repackaged malware is slicing the app to split benign components apart from the malicious ones. To address this problem, we use differential analysis to isolate software components that are irrelevant to the campaign and study the behavior of malicious riders alone. Our analysis framework relies on collective repositories and recent advances on the systematization of intelligence extracted from multiple anti-virus vendors. We find that since its infancy in 2010, the Android malware ecosystem has changed significantly, both in the type of malicious activity performed by malware and in the level of obfuscation used to avoid detection. Finally, we discuss what our findings mean for Android malware detection research, highlighting areas that need further attention by the research community. In particular, we show that riders of malware families evolve over time. This evidences important experimental bias in research works levering on automated systems for family identification without considering variants.

BackgroundThe use of text messaging or short message service (SMS) for injury reporting is a recent innovation in sport and has not yet been trialled at the community level. Considering...

Android malware has become the topmost threat for the ubiquitous and useful Android ecosystem. Multiple solutions leveraging big data and machine-learning capabilities to detect Android malware are being constantly developed. Too often, these solutions are either limited to research output or remain isolated and incapable of reaching end users or malware researchers. An earlier work named PACE (Platform for Android Malware Classification and Performance Evaluation), was introduced as a unified solution to offer open and easy implementation access to several machine-learning-based Android malware detection techniques, that makes most of the research reproducible in this domain. The benefits of PACE are offered through three interfaces: Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API), Web Interface, and Android Debug Bridge (ADB) interface. These multiple interfaces enable users with different expertise such as IT administrators, security practitioners, malware researchers, etc. to use their offered services. In this paper, we propose PACER (Platform for Android Malware Classification, Performance Evaluation, and Threat Reporting), which extends PACE by adding threat intelligence and reporting functionality for the end-user device through the ADB interface. A prototype of the proposed platform is introduced, and our vision is that it will help malware analysts and end users to tackle challenges and reduce the amount of manual work.

Intelligent fault diagnosis is an important method in rotating machinery fault diagnosis and equipment health management. To deal with co-frequency vibration faults, a type of typical fault in rotating machinery, this paper proposes a fault diagnosis method based on the stacked autoencoder (SAE) and ensembled ResNet-SVM. Furthermore, the time- and frequency-domain features of several co-frequency vibration faults are summarized based on the mechanism analysis and calculated using actual vibration data. To realize and validate the high-precision diagnosis method of rotating equipment with co-frequency faults proposed in this study, the following three criteria are required: First, to improve the effectiveness and robustness of the ensembled model and the sliding window using data augmentation, adding noise, autoencoder (AE) and SAE methods are analyzed in terms of principle and practical effects. Second, ResNet is used as the feature extractor for the ensembled ResNet-SVM model. Feature extraction is carried out twice, and the extracted co-frequency fault features are more comprehensive. Finally, the data augmentation method and ensemble ResNet-SVM are combined for fault diagnosis and compared with other methods. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed method can exceed 99.9%.

The rapid serial visual presentation-based brain–computer interface (RSVP-BCI) system achieves the recognition of target images by extracting event-related potential (ERP) features from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals and then building target classification models. Currently, how to reduce the training and calibration time for classification models across different subjects is a crucial issue in the practical application of RSVP. To address this issue, a zero-calibration (ZC) method termed Attention-ProNet, which involves meta-learning with a prototype network integrating multiple attention mechanisms, was proposed in this study. In particular, multiscale attention mechanisms were used for efficient EEG feature extraction. Furthermore, a hybrid attention mechanism was introduced to enhance model generalization, and attempts were made to incorporate suitable data augmentation and channel selection methods to develop an innovative and high-performance ZC RSVP-BCI decoding model algorithm. The experimental results demonstrated that our method achieved a balance accuracy (BA) of 86.33% in the decoding task for new subjects. Moreover, appropriate channel selection and data augmentation methods further enhanced the performance of the network by affording an additional 2.3% increase in BA. The model generated by the meta-learning prototype network Attention-ProNet, which incorporates multiple attention mechanisms, allows for the efficient and accurate decoding of new subjects without the need for recalibration or retraining.

MADRAS-NET: A deep learning approach for detecting and classifying android malware using Linknet

The popularity of the Android operating system has been rising ever since its initial release in 2008. This is due to two major reasons. The first is that Android is open-source, due to which a lot of mobile manufacturing companies use some form of modified Android OS for their devices. The second reason is that a wide variety of applications with different designs and utility can be built with ease for Android devices. With this much popularity, gaining unwanted attention of cybercriminals is inevitable. Hence, there has been a huge rise in the number of malware being developed for Android devices. To address this problem, we present ADAM (Automatic Detection of Android Malware), an Android application that uses machine learning (ML) for automatic detection of malware in Android applications. ADAM is trained with CICMalDroid 2020 Android Malware dataset and tested for both CICMalDroid 2020 and CICMalDroid 2017 dataset. The experiment analysis showed that it achieves more than 98.5% accuracy. ADAM considers only static analysis, so becomes easy to deploy in smart phone to alert the user. ADAM is deployed over android mobile phone.KeywordsSecurityMalware detectionAndroidMachine learning

With the rapid development of the Internet era, the number of malware has reached an unprecedented peak, and therefore malware is threatening global network security seriously. In this article, we propose an Android malware detection approach based on SIMGRU, which belongs to the static detection approach. The similarity of clustering is widely used in static analysis of android malware, so we introduce the similarity to improve Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and obtain three different structures of SimGRU: InputSimGRU, HiddenSimGRU, and InputHiddenSimGRU. The InputHiddenSimGRU is the combination of InputSimGRU and HiddenSimGRU. The experiment shows that InputSimGRU, HiddenSimGRU, and InputHiddenSimGRU outperform the conventional GRU model and other methods.

Low-resource languages often face the problem of insufficient data, which leads to poor quality in machine translation. One approach to address this issue is data augmentation. Data augmentation involves creating new data by transforming existing data through methods such as flipping, cropping, rotating, and adding noise. Traditionally, pseudo-parallel corpora are generated by randomly replacing words in low-resource language machine translation. However, this method can introduce ambiguity, as the same word may have different meanings in different contexts. This study proposes a new approach for low-resource language machine translation, which involves generating pseudo-parallel corpora by replacing phrases. The performance of this approach is compared with other data augmentation methods, and it is observed that combining it with other data augmentation methods further improves performance. To enhance the robustness of the model, R-Drop regularization is also used. R-Drop is an effective method for improving the quality of machine translation. The proposed method was tested on Chinese–Kazakh (Arabic script) translation tasks, resulting in performance improvements of 4.99 and 7.7 for Chinese-to-Kazakh and Kazakh-to-Chinese translations, respectively. By combining the generation of pseudo-parallel corpora through phrase replacement with the application of R-Drop regularization, there is a significant advancement in machine translation performance for low-resource languages.

The success of training deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) heavily depends on a significant amount of labelled data. Recent research has found that neural style transfer algorithms can apply the artistic style of one image to another image without changing the latter's high-level semantic content, which makes it feasible to employ neural style transfer as a data augmentation method to add more variation to the training dataset. The contribution of this paper is a thorough evaluation of the effectiveness of the neural style transfer as a data augmentation method for image classification tasks. We explore the state-of-the-art neural style transfer algorithms and apply them as a data augmentation method on Caltech 101 and Caltech 256 dataset, where we found around 2% improvement from 83% to 85% of the image classification accuracy with VGG16, compared with traditional data augmentation strategies. We also combine this new method with conventional data augmentation approaches to further improve the performance of image classification. This work shows the potential of neural style transfer in computer vision field, such as helping us to reduce the difficulty of collecting sufficient labelled data and improve the performance of generic image-based deep learning algorithms.