Deep Image: A precious image based deep learning method for online malware detection in IoT environment

Abstract

In this study, we address the challenge of online malware detection for IoT devices. We propose a method that monitors malware behavior, extracts dynamic features, and converts them into sparse binary images for analysis. The primary problem is to identify the most effective approach among clustering, probabilistic, and deep learning methods for analyzing this unique image dataset. We extract dynamic features from the monitored malware behavior, transforming them into binary images, which are then subjected to three different analysis methods. The clustering, probabilistic, and deep learning approaches are compared and evaluated in terms of various metrics. Our study contributes insights into the performance of various online malware detection approaches for IoT devices. We demonstrate that deep learning outperforms other methods, achieving the best results in seven out of eight metrics. The results of our analysis reveal that the deep learning approach exhibits the highest accuracy in seven of the eight evaluated metrics. We found that the lattice-based approach consistently returns the maximum maliciousness level, which can be instrumental in label flipping scenarios.