The paper introduces Replicant, a deep reinforcement learning framework that learns to evade malware detectors under a strict label‑only black‑box threat model. Replicant generates reusable policies for modifying malware samples and deciding when to query the target, and it transfers across different samples, detectors, and feature spaces. In experiments on seven Android malware detectors and three feature spaces, Replicant achieves a mean attack success rate of 78.8%, outperforming state‑of‑the‑art methods by 20.9%–39.2% and providing a stronger signal for adversarial training to harden detectors.
By Shae McFadden, Ilias Tsingenopoulos, Mario D'Onghia, Alexander Herzog, Myles Foley, Chris Hicks, Lorenzo Cavallaro, Fabio Pierazzi
arXiv:2511. 11439v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Binary security has increasingly relied on deep learning to reason about malware behavior and program semantics.
By Yiling He, Junchi Lei, Hongyu She, Shuo Shao, Xinran Zheng, Yiping Liu, Zhan Qin, Lorenzo Cavallaro
arXiv:2503.11841v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) malware detectors rely heavily on crowd-sourced AntiVirus (AV) labels, with platforms like VirusTotal serving as truste...
By Tianwei Lan, Luca Demetrio, Farid Nait-Abdesselam, Yufei Han, Simone Aonzo
arXiv:2609.06346v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Continual learning (CL) enables models to acquire new knowledge from sequentially arriving tasks while retaining previously learned knowledge. However,...
By Keyu Lin, Fei Ye, Qihe Liu, Shijie Zhou, Jiguo Yu
arXiv:2608. 13465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept drift refers to changes over time in the statistical properties of data, as compared to the data that was used to train a learning model.
By Christofer Washington Berruz Chungata, Martin Jurecek, Katerina Potika, William B. Andreopoulos, Mark Stamp
The paper addresses the challenge of adapting malware detection systems to new threats without retraining from scratch, focusing on the Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) setting. It proposes a hybrid framework that uses a self-supervised learning backbone pre-trained on malware packets, incorporates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to adapt the model while preserving core representations, and employs a prototype-based classification head for incremental sessions. Experiments on multiple datasets show that this approach consistently outperforms existing FSCIL baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
By Kyle Stein, Guillermo Francia, III Eman El-Sheikh, Andrew Arash Mahyari
arXiv:2605. 09028v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning-based Android malware detectors often fail in real-world deployment due to domain shift, where models trained on one data source perform poorly on applications from another.
By Md Rafid Islam
arXiv:2606. 14987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical systems (CPS) increasingly rely on continual learning (CL) to adapt to evolving environments, device heterogeneity, and concept drift, thereby improving overall utility.
By Oxana Salish, Kuniyilh S
arXiv:2606. 19023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The growing reliance on pre-trained Machine Learning (ML) models has introduced new attack surfaces.
By Gabriele Digregorio, Marco Di Gennaro, Francesco Pastore, Stefano Zanero, Stefano Longari, Michele Carminati
arXiv:2605. 24903v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning based malware detectors become obsolete over time due to concept drift in benign and malware applications.
By Suresh Kumar Amalapuram, Bikraj Shresta, Siva Ram murthy Chebiyam, Bheemarjuna Reddy Tamma, Sumohana S Channappayya
arXiv:2606. 03523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Early attribution of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) activity can help defenders prioritise investigation, select countermeasures, and reduce the impact of an intrusion.
By Peter Williams, Adam Sobey, Erisa Karafili
The paper introduces Fed-ADR, a coordinated attack framework where a malicious orchestrator server directs heterogeneous adversarial clients to adapt their gradient updates in real time, thereby evading existing federated learning defenses and drastically reducing global model accuracy. It also presents a lightweight detection mechanism that estimates true client gradients from historical data to spot coordinated attacks, and an in-situ recovery method that restores model performance without restarting training. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion‑MNIST, and CIFAR‑10 show the attack can drop accuracy from over 90% to below 10%, while the defense can recover accuracy to above 90% within a few rounds at a computational cost at least 20× lower than retraining from scratch.
By Mohamed Shaaban, Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy