Computer vision is playing an increasingly important role in automated
malware detection with the rise of the image-based binary representation. These
binary images are fast to generate, require no feature engineering, and are
resilient to popular obfuscation methods. Significant research has been
conducted in this area, however, it has been restricted to small-scale or
private datasets that only a few industry labs and research teams have access
to. This lack of availability hinders examination of existing work, development
of new research, and dissemination of ideas. We release MalNet-Image, the
largest public cybersecurity image database, offering 24x more images and 70x
more classes than existing databases (available at https://mal-net.org).
MalNet-Image contains over 1.2 million malware images -- across 47 types and
696 families -- democratizing image-based malware capabilities by enabling
researchers and practitioners to evaluate techniques that were previously
reported in propriety settings. We report the first million-scale malware
detection results on binary images. MalNet-Image unlocks new and unique
opportunities to advance the frontiers of machine learning, enabling new
research directions into vision-based cyber defenses, multi-class imbalanced
classification, and interpretable security.