AI assisted malware analysis: a course for next generation cybersecurity workforce

M Gupta, S Mittal, M Abdelsalam - arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.11101, 2020 - arxiv.org
arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.11101, 2020arxiv.org
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to solve cybersecurity
problems has been gaining traction within industry and academia, in part as a response to
widespread malware attacks on critical systems, such as cloud infrastructures, government
offices or hospitals, and the vast amounts of data they generate. AI-and ML-assisted
cybersecurity offers data-driven automation that could enable security systems to identify
and respond to cyber threats in real time. However, there is currently a shortfall of …
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to solve cybersecurity problems has been gaining traction within industry and academia, in part as a response to widespread malware attacks on critical systems, such as cloud infrastructures, government offices or hospitals, and the vast amounts of data they generate. AI- and ML-assisted cybersecurity offers data-driven automation that could enable security systems to identify and respond to cyber threats in real time. However, there is currently a shortfall of professionals trained in AI and ML for cybersecurity. Here we address the shortfall by developing lab-intensive modules that enable undergraduate and graduate students to gain fundamental and advanced knowledge in applying AI and ML techniques to real-world datasets to learn about Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), malware analysis, and classification, among other important topics in cybersecurity. Here we describe six self-contained and adaptive modules in "AI-assisted Malware Analysis." Topics include: (1) CTI and malware attack stages, (2) malware knowledge representation and CTI sharing, (3) malware data collection and feature identification, (4) AI-assisted malware detection, (5) malware classification and attribution, and (6) advanced malware research topics and case studies such as adversarial learning and Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) detection.
arxiv.org