GAN-Based Adversarial Patch for Malware C2 Traffic to Bypass DL Detector

Abstract

The constantly evolving malware brings great challenges to network security defense. Fortunately, deep learning (DL)-based system achieved good performance in the malware command and control (C2) traffic detection field due to its excellent representation capabilities. However, DL models have been shown to be vulnerable to evasion attacks, that is, DL models can easily be misled by adding subtle perturbations to the original samples. In this paper, we propose a GAN-based evasion method, which can help malware C2 traffic bypass the DL detector. Our main contributions contain: (1) directly generate adversarial traffic that can implement malicious functions by inserting additional adversarial patches in the original flow; (2) adaptively imitating victim’s normal traffic by training GAN in victim environment, and introducing transfer learning to reduce the additional victim resource usage caused by GAN training. Results show that the adversarial patch generated by GAN can prevent malware C2 traffic from being detected with 51.4% success rate. The higher time efficiency and smaller malware impact make our method more suitable for real attacks.

This work is supported by the Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS (No. 2019163), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61902396), the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. XDC02040100), the Key Laboratory of Network Assessment Technology at Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing Key Laboratory of Network security and Protection Technology.