{"title":"MALITE: Lightweight Malware Detection and Classification for Constrained Devices","authors":"Sidharth Anand;Barsha Mitra;Soumyadeep Dey;Abhinav Rao;Rupsha Dhar;Jaideep Vaidya","doi":"10.1109/TETC.2025.3566370","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Today, malware is one of the primary cyber threats to organizations, pervading all types of computing devices, including resource constrained devices such as mobile phones, tablets and embedded devices like Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. In recent years, researchers have leveraged machine learning based strategies for malware detection and classification. However, malware analysis approaches can only be employed in resource constrained environments if the methods are lightweight in nature. In this paper, we present MALITE, a lightweight malware analysis system, that can distinguish between benign and malicious binaries and classify various malware families. MALITE converts a binary into a grayscale or an RGB image requiring low memory and battery power consumption and uses computationally inexpensive malware analysis strategies. We have designed MALITE-MN, a lightweight neural network based architecture and MALITE-HRF, an ultra lightweight random forest based method that uses histogram features extracted by a sliding window. An extensive empirical evaluation is conducted on seven publicly available datasets (Malimg, Microsoft BIG, Dumpware10, MOTIF, Drebin, CICAndMal2017 and MalNet), and performance is compared to four state-of-the-art baselines. The results show that MALITE-MN and MALITE-HRF not only accurately identify and classify malware but also respectively consume several orders of magnitude lower resources (in terms of both memory as well as computation capabilities), making them much more suitable for resource constrained environments.","PeriodicalId":13156,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing","volume":"13 3","pages":"1099-1112"},"PeriodicalIF":5.4000,"publicationDate":"2025-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10994313/","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Today, malware is one of the primary cyber threats to organizations, pervading all types of computing devices, including resource constrained devices such as mobile phones, tablets and embedded devices like Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. In recent years, researchers have leveraged machine learning based strategies for malware detection and classification. However, malware analysis approaches can only be employed in resource constrained environments if the methods are lightweight in nature. In this paper, we present MALITE, a lightweight malware analysis system, that can distinguish between benign and malicious binaries and classify various malware families. MALITE converts a binary into a grayscale or an RGB image requiring low memory and battery power consumption and uses computationally inexpensive malware analysis strategies. We have designed MALITE-MN, a lightweight neural network based architecture and MALITE-HRF, an ultra lightweight random forest based method that uses histogram features extracted by a sliding window. An extensive empirical evaluation is conducted on seven publicly available datasets (Malimg, Microsoft BIG, Dumpware10, MOTIF, Drebin, CICAndMal2017 and MalNet), and performance is compared to four state-of-the-art baselines. The results show that MALITE-MN and MALITE-HRF not only accurately identify and classify malware but also respectively consume several orders of magnitude lower resources (in terms of both memory as well as computation capabilities), making them much more suitable for resource constrained environments.
期刊介绍:
IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing publishes papers on emerging aspects of computer science, computing technology, and computing applications not currently covered by other IEEE Computer Society Transactions. Some examples of emerging topics in computing include: IT for Green, Synthetic and organic computing structures and systems, Advanced analytics, Social/occupational computing, Location-based/client computer systems, Morphic computer design, Electronic game systems, & Health-care IT.