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A Semi-supervised Learning Method for Malware Traffic Classification with Raw Bitmaps

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Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (CollaborateCom 2023)

Abstract

The rapid growth of malware and its variants has a significant detrimental effect on the security of the Internet infrastructure. In recent years, deep learning-based methods have demonstrated significant success in malware detection. Nonetheless, there are concerns regarding the requirement for substantial labeled data and the feature selection methods used in present approaches. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised learning-based method for malware traffic classification, which exploits the raw bitmap representation of malware traffic. We employ stacked bi-LSTM to learn the feature representation of malware traffic and adopt semi-supervised learning (SSL) to enhance the model performance by leveraging unlabeled traffic. Pseudo-labeling and consistency regularization are used to produce pseudo-labels, which can compute unsupervised loss. The loss function consists of two terms: a supervised loss applied to labeled data and an unsupervised loss, which are combined together for model training. Experiments indicate that our method is capable of classifying malware traffic with satisfactory accuracy.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. The corresponding author is Xi Wang.

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Correspondence to Xi Wang .

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Ma, J., Xu, X., Zang, T., Wang, X., Feng, B., Li, X. (2024). A Semi-supervised Learning Method for Malware Traffic Classification with Raw Bitmaps. In: Gao, H., Wang, X., Voros, N. (eds) Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing. CollaborateCom 2023. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 562. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54528-3_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54528-3_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-54527-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-54528-3

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