Abstract
N-grams are the basic features commonly used in sequence-based malicious code detection methods in computer virology research. The empirical results from previous works suggest that, while short length n-grams are easier to extract, the characteristics of the underlying executables are better represented in lengthier n-grams. However, by increasing the length of an n-gram, the feature space grows in an exponential manner and much space and computational resources are demanded. And therefore, feature selection has turned to be the most challenging step in establishing an accurate detection system based on byte n-grams. In this paper we propose an efficient feature extraction method where in order to gain more information; both adjacent and non-adjacent bi-grams are used. Additionally, we present a novel boosting feature selection method based on genetic algorithm. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed detection system detects virus programs far more accurately than the best earlier known methods.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Mitchell, T.: Machine Learning. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1997)
Schultz, M., Eskin, E., Zadok, E., Stolfo, S.: Data mining methods for detection of new malicious executables. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 38–49 (2001)
Abou-Assaleh, T., Cercone, N., Keselj, V., Sweidan, R.: Detection of new malicious code using n-grams signatures. In: PST, pp. 193–196 (2004)
Yang, Y., Pedersen, J.O.: A comparative study on feature selection in text categorization. In: Fisher, D.H. (ed.) Proceedings of ICML 1997, 14th International Conference on Machine Learning, Nashville, pp. 412–420 (1997)
Kolter, J.Z., Maloof, M.A.: Learning to detect malicious executables in the wild. In: Proceedings of the Tenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 470–478 (2004)
Cohen, F.: Computer Viruses - Theory and Experiments. IFIP-TC11 Computers and Security 6, 22–35 (1987)
Reddy, D.K.S., Pujari, A.K.: N-gram analysis for computer virus detection. Journal in Computer Virology 2(3), 231–239 (2006)
Morin, B., Mé, L.: Intrusion detection and virology: an analysis of differences, similarities and complementariness. Journal of Computer Virology, vol 3, 39–49 (2007)
Filiol, E.: Computer viruses: from theory to applications. Springer, New York (2005)
Adleman, L.M.: An Abstract Theory of Computer Viruses. In: Goldwasser, S. (ed.) CRYPTO 1988. LNCS, vol. 403, pp. 354–374. Springer, Heidelberg (1990)
Kolter, J.Z., Maloof, M.A.: Learning to detect malicious executables in the wild. The Journal of Machine Learning Research 7, 2721–2744 (2006)
Minaei-Bidgoli, B., Kortemeyer, G., Punch, W.F.: Optimizing Classification Ensembles via a Genetic Algorithm for a Web-Based Educational System. In: Fred, A., Caelli, T.M., Duin, R.P.W., Campilho, A.C., de Ridder, D. (eds.) SSPR&SPR 2004. LNCS, vol. 3138, pp. 397–406. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Breiman, L.: Arcing classifiers. The Annals of Statistics 26(3), 801–823 (1998)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Parvin, H., Minaei, B., Karshenas, H., Beigi, A. (2011). A New N-gram Feature Extraction-Selection Method for Malicious Code. In: Dobnikar, A., Lotrič, U., Šter, B. (eds) Adaptive and Natural Computing Algorithms. ICANNGA 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6594. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20267-4_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20267-4_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20266-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20267-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)