Malicious code detection based on CNNs and multi-objective algorithm

Abstract An increasing amount of malicious code causes harm on the internet by threatening user privacy as one of the primary sources of network security vulnerabilities. The detection of malicious code is becoming increasingly crucial, and current methods of detection require much improvement. This paper proposes a method to advance the detection of malicious code using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and intelligence algorithm. The CNNs are used to identify and classify grayscale images converted from executable files of malicious code. Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) is then employed to deal with the data imbalance of malware families. A series of experiments are designed for malware image data from Vision Research Lab. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective, maintaining higher accuracy and less loss.