The detection of zero-day attacks and vulnerabilities is a challenging
problem. It is of utmost importance for network administrators to identify them
with high accuracy. The higher the accuracy is, the more robust the defense
mechanism will be. In an ideal scenario (i.e., 100% accuracy) the system can
detect zero-day malware without being concerned about mistakenly tagging benign
files as malware or enabling disruptive malicious code running as
none-malicious ones. This paper investigates different machine learning
algorithms to find out how well they can detect zero-day malware. Through the
examination of 34 machine/deep learning classifiers, we found that the random
forest classifier offered the best accuracy. The paper poses several research
questions regarding the performance of machine and deep learning algorithms
when detecting zero-day malware with zero rates for false positive and false
negative.