Malware remains a big threat to cyber security, calling for machine learning
based malware detection. While promising, such detectors are known to be
vulnerable to evasion attacks. Ensemble learning typically facilitates
countermeasures, while attackers can leverage this technique to improve attack
effectiveness as well. This motivates us to investigate which kind of
robustness the ensemble defense or effectiveness the ensemble attack can
achieve, particularly when they combat with each other. We thus propose a new
attack approach, named mixture of attacks, by rendering attackers capable of
multiple generative methods and multiple manipulation sets, to perturb a
malware example without ruining its malicious functionality. This naturally
leads to a new instantiation of adversarial training, which is further geared
to enhancing the ensemble of deep neural networks. We evaluate defenses using
Android malware detectors against 26 different attacks upon two practical
datasets. Experimental results show that the new adversarial training
significantly enhances the robustness of deep neural networks against a wide
range of attacks, ensemble methods promote the robustness when base classifiers
are robust enough, and yet ensemble attacks can evade the enhanced malware
detectors effectively, even notably downgrading the VirusTotal service.