SMASH: A Malware Detection Method Based on Multi-Feature Ensemble Learning

With the increasing variants of malware, it is of great significance to detect malware and ensure system security effectively. The existing malware dynamic detection methods are vulnerable to evasion attacks. For this situation, we propose a malware dynamic detection method based on mufti-feature ensemble learning. Firstly, the method adopts the combination of software features such as API call sequence with high detection precision and low-level hardware features such as resistance to evasion the memory dump grayscale and hardware performance counters. Secondly, we improve each feature based on the original research. We select a more advanced classifier model to improve the detection precision of a single feature. Finally, an ensemble learning algorithm composed of multiple classification algorithms detects malware, the multi-features can describe malware behavior from multi-dimensions to improve detection performance. We use a large number of malware sample dataset to experiment, and the results show that our detection method can obtain good detection precision rate, and is better than other recently proposed dynamic detection methods in anti-evasion performance.