On benign features in malware detection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates the problem of classifying Android applications into malicious and benign. We analyze the performance of a popular malware detection tool, Drebin, and show that its correct classification decisions often stem from using benign rather than malicious features for making predictions. That, effectively, turns the classifier into a benign app detector rather than a malware detector. While such behavior allows the classifier to achieve a high detection accuracy, it also makes it vulnerable to attacks, e.g., by a malicious app pretending to be benign by using features similar to those of benign apps. In this paper, we propose an approach for deprioritizing benign features in malware detection, focusing the detection on truly malicious portions of the apps. We show that our proposed approach makes a classifier more resilient to attacks while still allowing it to maintain a high detection accuracy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".