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An Efficient Hybrid Approach for Malware Detection Using Frequent Opcodes and API Call Sequences

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Computational Intelligence

Abstract

Malicious software attacks are increasing every day despite so many preventive measures, and many detection mechanisms are available in the literature. Most of the detection mechanisms use either static or dynamic attributes of the malicious and legitimate samples with machine learning classification methods to distinguish malware from benignware. In this article, the static and dynamic features are joined to prepare a hybrid feature set which is used with machine learning algorithms for classification. The operation code sequences of samples are extracted through static analysis, and API call sequences are extracted through dynamic analysis. Both the feature vectors are joined to form a hybrid feature set which is then passed through three machine learning algorithms for experimental evaluation. Hybrid feature set has achieved higher accuracy and low error rate in comparison with the static and dynamic datasets when used individually with all the selected algorithms.

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Correspondence to Om Prakash Samantray .

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Samantray, O.P., Tripathy, S.N. (2023). An Efficient Hybrid Approach for Malware Detection Using Frequent Opcodes and API Call Sequences. In: Shukla, A., Murthy, B.K., Hasteer, N., Van Belle, JP. (eds) Computational Intelligence. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 968. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7346-8_63

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