Semi-supervised Learning for Unknown Malware Detection

Malware is any kind of computer software potentially harmful to both computers and networks. The amount of malware is increasing every year and poses a serious global security threat. Signature-based detection is the most widely used commercial antivirus method, however, it consistently fails to detect new malware. Supervised machine-learning models have been used to solve this issue, but the usefulness of supervised learning is far to be perfect because it requires that a significant amount of malicious code and benign software to be identified and labelled beforehand. In this paper, we propose a new method of malware protection that adopts a semi-supervised learning approach to detect unknown malware. This method is designed to build a machine-learning classifier using a set of labelled (malware and legitimate software) and unlabelled instances.We performed an empirical validation demonstrating that the labelling efforts are lower than when supervised learning is used, while maintaining high accuracy rates.