1211, 2020

ROOTs 2020: No Need to Teach New Tricks to Old Malware: Winning an Evasion Challenge with XOR-based Adversarial – Fabrício Ceschin

Sanna/ November 12, 2020/ ROOTS

Adversarial machine learning is so popular nowadays that Machine Learning (ML) based security solutions became the target of many attacks and, as a consequence, they need to adapt to them to be effective. In our talk, we explore attacks in different ML-models used to detect malware, as part of our experience in the Machine Learning Security Evasion Competition (MLSEC) 2020, sponsored by Microsoft and CUJO AI’s Vulnerability Research Lab, in which we managed to finish in first and second positions in the attacker’ and defender challenge, respectively. During the contest’s first edition (2019), participating teams were challenged to bypass three ML models in a white box manner. Our team bypassed all three of them and reported interesting insights about the models’ weaknesses. This year, the challenge evolved into an attack-and-defense model: the teams should either propose

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2211, 2019

ROOTS 2019 Talk: Shallow Security: on the Creation of Adversarial Variants to Evade ML-Based Malware Detectors – Fabricio Ceschin

Sanna/ November 22, 2019/ ROOTS

The use of Machine Learning (ML) techniques for malware detection has been a trend in the last two decades. More recently, researchers started to investigate adversarial approaches to bypass these ML-based malware detectors. Adversarial attacks became so popular that a large Internet company (ENDGAME Inc.) has launched a public challenge to encourage researchers to bypass their (three) ML-based static malware detectors. Our research group teamed to participate in this challenge in August/2019 and accomplishing the bypass of all 150 tests proposed by the company. To do so, we implemented an automatic exploitation method which moves the original malware binary sections to resources and includes new chunks of data to it to create adversarial samples that not only bypassed their ML detectors, but also real AV engines as well (with a lower detection rate than

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