Detecting Malicious .NET Files Using CLR Header Features and Machine Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The .Net Framework has made writing windows applications easier than ever. Several programming languages can be used to write software using the .Net Framework, the most common one being C#. Due to the abundance of modules and pre-built functionalities that allow programmers to easily manipulate the windows operating system with high abstraction and no need for low-level coding, the .Net framework has also become a desirable environment for malicious actors to write their malware. To best of our knowledge, researchers have been treating .NET malware and other malware the same way by utilizing features from the PE header to classify the files. This is not possible for.Net files because their PE headers are nearly identical. In this paper, we tackle the problem of detecting malicious .Net files by extracting features from the CLR header. As far as we know, we are the first ones to explore this approach. Furthermore, we create a new dataset comprised of.Net malware and benign files, which we freely distribute to the research community. Finally, we assess the performance of several machine learning algorithms to detect malicious .NET files. The random forest model was the best solution among the set of algorithms tested, exhibiting a performance of 92% for this predictive task.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".