Eliel Martins¹, Javier Bermejo Higuera^2,*, Ricardo Sant’Ana¹, Juan Ramón Bermejo Higuera², Juan Antonio Sicilia Montalvo², Diego Piedrahita Castillo³

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.142, No.3, pp. 3031-3067, 2025, DOI:10.32604/cmes.2025.061080 - 03 March 2025

Abstract The growing threat of malware, particularly in the Portable Executable (PE) format, demands more effective methods for detection and classification. Machine learning-based approaches exhibit their potential but often neglect semantic segmentation of malware files that can improve classification performance. This research applies deep learning to malware detection, using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures adapted to work with semantically extracted data to classify malware into malware families. Starting from the Malconv model, this study introduces modifications to adapt it to multi-classification tasks and improve its performance. It proposes a new innovative method that focuses on byte More >

Khaled Soliman^1,*, Mohamed Sobh², Ayman M. Bahaa-Eldin²

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.79, No.1, pp. 1419-1439, 2024, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2024.048883 - 25 April 2024

Abstract The continuous development of cyberattacks is threatening digital transformation endeavors worldwide and leads to wide losses for various organizations. These dangers have proven that signature-based approaches are insufficient to prevent emerging and polymorphic attacks. Therefore, this paper is proposing a Robust Malicious Executable Detection (RMED) using Host-based Machine Learning Classifier to discover malicious Portable Executable (PE) files in hosts using Windows operating systems through collecting PE headers and applying machine learning mechanisms to detect unknown infected files. The authors have collected a novel reliable dataset containing 116,031 benign files and 179,071 malware samples from diverse… More >

Hasan H. Al-Khshali^1,*, Muhammad Ilyas²

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.74, No.1, pp. 153-178, 2023, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2023.032182 - 22 September 2022

Abstract One aspect of cybersecurity, incorporates the study of Portable Executables (PE) files maleficence. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be employed in such studies, since AI has the ability to discriminate benign from malicious files. In this study, an exclusive set of 29 features was collected from trusted implementations, this set was used as a baseline to analyze the presented work in this research. A Decision Tree (DT) and Neural Network Multi-Layer Perceptron (NN-MLPC) algorithms were utilized during this work. Both algorithms were chosen after testing a few diverse procedures. This work implements a method of subgrouping… More >

Zuwei Tian^1,*, Hengfu Yang¹, Zhichen Gao²

Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing, Vol.33, No.1, pp. 133-142, 2022, DOI:10.32604/iasc.2022.024494 - 05 January 2022

Abstract PE (Portable executable) file is a standard format for executable file and is applied extensively. PE file has diversity, uncertainty of file size, complexity of file structure and singleness of file format, which make PE file easy to be a carrier of information hiding, especially for that of large hiding capacity. A novel software information hiding algorithm is proposed, which makes full use of display characteristics of palette icon of portable executable file. In this algorithm, the information is embedded into the transparent area of the icon by taking advantage of the redundant color items… More >