CyberSentinel: A Transparent Defense Framework for Malware Detection in High-Stakes Operational Environments

Malware classification is a crucial step in defending against potential malware attacks. Despite the significance of a robust malware classifier, existing approaches reveal notable limitations in achieving high performance in malware classification. This study focuses on image-based malware detection, where malware binaries are transformed into visual representations to leverage image classification techniques. We propose a two-branch deep network designed to capture salient features from these malware images. The proposed network integrates faster asymmetric spatial attention to refine the extracted features of its backbone. Additionally, it incorporates an auxiliary feature branch to learn missing information about malware images. The feasibility of the proposed method has been thoroughly examined and compared with state-of-the-art deep learning-based classification methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can surpass its counterparts across various evaluation metrics.