The wide acceptance of Internet of Things (IoT) for both household and
industrial applications is accompanied by several security concerns. A major
security concern is their probable abuse by adversaries towards their malicious
intent. Understanding and analyzing IoT malicious behaviors is crucial,
especially with their rapid growth and adoption in wide-range of applications.
However, recent studies have shown that machine learning-based approaches are
susceptible to adversarial attacks by adding junk codes to the binaries, for
example, with an intention to fool those machine learning or deep
learning-based detection systems. Realizing the importance of addressing this
challenge, this study proposes a malware detection system that is robust to
adversarial attacks. To do so, examine the performance of the state-of-the-art
methods against adversarial IoT software crafted using the graph embedding and
augmentation techniques. In particular, we study the robustness of such methods
against two black-box adversarial methods, GEA and SGEA, to generate
Adversarial Examples (AEs) with reduced overhead, and keeping their
practicality intact. Our comprehensive experimentation with GEA-based AEs show
the relation between misclassification and the graph size of the injected
sample. Upon optimization and with small perturbation, by use of SGEA, all the
IoT malware samples are misclassified as benign. This highlights the
vulnerability of current detection systems under adversarial settings. With the
landscape of possible adversarial attacks, we then propose DL-FHMC, a
fine-grained hierarchical learning approach for malware detection and
classification, that is robust to AEs with a capability to detect 88.52% of the
malicious AEs.