Artificial neural networks have been successfully used for many different
classification tasks including malware detection and distinguishing between
malicious and non-malicious programs. Although artificial neural networks
perform very well on these tasks, they are also vulnerable to adversarial
examples. An adversarial example is a sample that has minor modifications made
to it so that the neural network misclassifies it. Many techniques have been
proposed, both for crafting adversarial examples and for hardening neural
networks against them. Most previous work has been done in the image domain.
Some of the attacks have been adopted to work in the malware domain which
typically deals with binary feature vectors. In order to better understand the
space of adversarial examples in malware classification, we study different
approaches of crafting adversarial examples and defense techniques in the
malware domain and compare their effectiveness on multiple datasets.