MTMG: A Framework for Generating Adversarial Examples Targeting Multiple Learning-Based Malware Detection Systems

As machine learning technology continues to advance rapidly, an increasing number of researchers are utilizing it in the field of malware detection. Despite the fact that learning-based malware detection systems (LB-MDS) outperform traditional feature-based detection methods in terms of both performance and detection speed, recent research has shown that they are susceptible to attacks from adversarial examples. However, the adversarial examples generated thus far have only been effective against individual LB-MDS and have not been able to simultaneously attack multiple LB-MDS. In this paper, we propose a black-box adversarial attack framework called Multi-Target Malware Generation (MTMG), which leverages reinforcement learning to simultaneously attack multiple LB-MDS. MTMG selects the obfuscation method and its corresponding parameters from the action space based on the observed state of the malware, and then applies them to generate adversarial examples that deceive multiple LB-MDS. Our results indicate that when simultaneously attacking multiple LB-MDS, including EMBER, MalConv, and six commercial antivirus software, MTMG significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) works, achieving an impressive attack success rate over 82%, while the SOTA works achieve a success rate of less than 6%.