Malware Classification based on a Light-weight Architecture of CNN: MalShuffleNet

Abstract

Traditional methods of malware detection have difficulty in detecting massive malware variants. Malware detection based on malware visualization has been proved an effective method for identifying unknown malware variants. In order to improve the accuracy and reduce the detection time of above methods, a novel method for malware classification in a light-weight CNN architecture named MalshuffleNet is proposed. The model is customized based on ShuffleNet V2 by adjusting the numbers of the fully connected layer for adopting to malware classification. Empirical results on Malimg dataset indicate that our model achieves 99.03% in accuracy, and identify an unknown malware only taking 5.3 milliseconds on average.