Behavioral Malware Detection Using Deep Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

Malware behavioral graphs provide a rich source of information that can be leveraged for detection and classification tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel behavioral malware detection method based on Deep Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (DGCNNs) to learn directly from API call sequences and their associated behavioral graphs. In order to train and evaluate the models, we created a new public domain dataset of more than 40,000 API call sequences resulting from the execution of malware and goodware instances in a sandboxed environment. Experimental results show that our models achieve similar Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC-ROC) and F1-Score to Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks, widely used as the base architecture for behavioral malware detection methods, thus indicating that the models can effectively learn to distinguish between malicious and benign temporal patterns through convolution operations on graphs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that investigates the applicability of DGCNN to behavioral malware detection using API call sequences.