Despite many attempts, the state-of-the-art of adversarial machine learning
on malware detection systems generally yield unexecutable samples. In this
work, we set out to examine the robustness of visualization-based malware
detection system against adversarial examples (AEs) that not only are able to
fool the model, but also maintain the executability of the original input. As
such, we first investigate the application of existing off-the-shelf
adversarial attack approaches on malware detection systems through which we
found that those approaches do not necessarily maintain the functionality of
the original inputs. Therefore, we proposed an approach to generate adversarial
examples, COPYCAT, which is specifically designed for malware detection systems
considering two main goals; achieving a high misclassification rate and
maintaining the executability and functionality of the original input. We
designed two main configurations for COPYCAT, namely AE padding and sample
injection. While the first configuration results in untargeted
misclassification attacks, the sample injection configuration is able to force
the model to generate a targeted output, which is highly desirable in the
malware attribution setting. We evaluate the performance of COPYCAT through an
extensive set of experiments on two malware datasets, and report that we were
able to generate adversarial samples that are misclassified at a rate of 98.9%
and 96.5% with Windows and IoT binary datasets, respectively, outperforming the
misclassification rates in the literature. Most importantly, we report that
those AEs were executable unlike AEs generated by off-the-shelf approaches. Our
transferability study demonstrates that the generated AEs through our proposed
method can be generalized to other models.