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A New Method for Inferring Ground-Truth Labels and Malware Detector Effectiveness Metrics

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Science of Cyber Security (SciSec 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 13005))

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Abstract

In the context of malware detection, ground-truth labels of files are often difficult or costly to obtain; as a consequence, malware detector effectiveness metrics (e.g., false-positive and false-negative rates) are hard to measure. The unavailability of ground-truth labels also hinder the training of machine learning based malware detectors. These issues are often encountered by researchers and practitioners and force them to use various heuristics without justification. Therefore, seeking principled methods has become an important open problem. In this paper, we present a principled method for tackling the problem.

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Acknowledgement

We thank the reviewers for their useful comments. This work was supported in part by NSF Grant #2122631 (#1814825) and by a Grant from the State of Colorado.

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Correspondence to Shouhuai Xu .

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Charlton, J., Du, P., Xu, S. (2021). A New Method for Inferring Ground-Truth Labels and Malware Detector Effectiveness Metrics. In: Lu, W., Sun, K., Yung, M., Liu, F. (eds) Science of Cyber Security. SciSec 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13005. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89137-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89137-4_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-89137-4

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