GCSA-ResNet: a deep neural network architecture for Malware detection.

Journal: Scientific reports
Published Date:

Abstract

With the exponential growth in the quantity and complexity of malware, traditional detection methods face severe challenges. This paper proposes GCSA-ResNet, a novel deep learning model that significantly enhances malware detection performance by integrating the Global Channel-Spatial Attention (GCSA) module with ResNet-50. The core innovation lies in the GCSA module, which for the first time collaboratively designs channel attention, channel shuffling, and spatial attention mechanisms to simultaneously capture local texture features and global dependency relationships in visualized malware images. Compared with existing attention models such as SE and CBAM, GCSA strengthens cross-channel information interaction through channel shuffling operations and employs spatial attention with a 7 × 7 convolutional kernel to more effectively model long-range spatial correlations. Experiments on the Malimg and Microsoft BIG 2015 datasets demonstrate that GCSA-ResNet achieves over 98.50% accuracy, representing a performance improvement of more than 0.5% compared to baseline models. Quantitative results show that the model maintains stable performance in precision, recall, and F1-score, while reducing false positive rates by 40-50%. These advancements effectively address the limitations of existing methods in feature degradation and cross-family misclassification.

Authors

  • Yukang Fan
    School of Information Science and Technology, Hainan Normal University, Haikou, Hainan, 571158, China.
  • Kun Zhang
    Philosophy Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America.
  • Bing Zheng
    Key Laboratory of Flexible Electronics (KLOFE) & Institute of Advanced Materials (IAM) Nanjing Tech University (NanjingTech) 30 South Puzhu Road Nanjing 211816 P. R. China.
  • Yu Zhou
    Department of Biospectroscopy, Leibniz-Institut für Analytische Wissenschaften - ISAS - e.V., Dortmund, Germany.
  • Jinyang Zhou
    School of Information Science and Technology, Hainan Normal University, Haikou, Hainan, 571158, China.
  • Wenting Pan
    Department of Radiology, Taizhou Hospital of Zhejiang Province Affiliated to Wenzhou Medical University, 150 Ximen St, Linhai, Taizhou, 317000, Zhejiang, China.

Keywords

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