Comparison of Malware Classification Methods using Convolutional Neural Network based on API Call Stream

Malicious software is constantly being developed and improved, so detection and classification of malwareis an ever-evolving problem. Since traditional malware detection techniques fail to detect new/unknown malware, machine learning algorithms have been used to overcome this disadvantage. We present a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for malware type classification based on the API (Application Program Interface) calls. This research uses a database of 7107 instances of API call streams and 8 different malware types:Adware, Backdoor, Downloader, Dropper, Spyware, Trojan, Virus,Worm. We used a 1-Dimensional CNN by mapping API calls as categorical and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) vectors and compared the results to other classification techniques.The proposed 1-D CNN outperformed other classification techniques with 91% overall accuracy for both categorical and TFIDF vectors.