These labels were automatically added by AI and may be inaccurate. For details, see About Literature Database.
Abstract
Machine learning (ML) malware detectors rely heavily on crowd-sourced
AntiVirus (AV) labels, with platforms like VirusTotal serving as a trusted
source of malware annotations. But what if attackers could manipulate these
labels to classify benign software as malicious? We introduce label spoofing
attacks, a new threat that contaminates crowd-sourced datasets by embedding
minimal and undetectable malicious patterns into benign samples. These patterns
coerce AV engines into misclassifying legitimate files as harmful, enabling
poisoning attacks against ML-based malware classifiers trained on those data.
We demonstrate this scenario by developing AndroVenom, a methodology for
polluting realistic data sources, causing consequent poisoning attacks against
ML malware detectors. Experiments show that not only state-of-the-art feature
extractors are unable to filter such injection, but also various ML models
experience Denial of Service already with 1% poisoned samples. Additionally,
attackers can flip decisions of specific unaltered benign samples by modifying
only 0.015% of the training data, threatening their reputation and market share
and being unable to be stopped by anomaly detectors on training data. We
conclude our manuscript by raising the alarm on the trustworthiness of the
training process based on AV annotations, requiring further investigation on
how to produce proper labels for ML malware detectors.
External Datasets
Goodware Dataset (20,769 benign APKs from Google Play Store)
Malware Dataset (20,329 malicious APKs with 196 families)