Learning the PE Header, Malware Detection with Minimal Domain Knowledge

Understand

Many efforts have been made to use various forms of domain knowledge in malware detection.

• Currently there exist two common approaches to malware detection without domain knowledge, namely byte n-grams and strings.
• In this work we explore the feasibility of applying neural networks to malware detection and feature learning.
• We do this by restricting ourselves to a minimal amount of domain knowledge in order to extract a portion of the Portable Executable (PE) header.