DeepTrust: Multi-Step Classification through Dissimilar Adversarial Representations for Robust Android Malware Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pulido-Cortázar, Daniel, Gibert, Daniel, Manyà, Felip
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Pulido-Cortázar, Daniel
Gibert, Daniel
Manyà, Felip
author_facet Pulido-Cortázar, Daniel
Gibert, Daniel
Manyà, Felip
contents Over the last decade, machine learning has been extensively applied to identify malicious Android applications. However, such approaches remain vulnerable against adversarial examples, i.e., examples that are subtly manipulated to fool a machine learning model into making incorrect predictions. This research presents DeepTrust, a novel metaheuristic that arranges flexible classifiers, like deep neural networks, into an ordered sequence where the final decision is made by a single internal model based on conditions activated in cascade. In the Robust Android Malware Detection competition at the 2025 IEEE Conference SaTML, DeepTrust secured the first place and achieved state-of-the-art results, outperforming the next-best competitor by up to 266% under feature-space evasion attacks. This is accomplished while maintaining the highest detection rate on non-adversarial malware and a false positive rate below 1%. The method's efficacy stems from maximizing the divergence of the learned representations among the internal models. By using classifiers inducing fundamentally dissimilar embeddings of the data, the decision space becomes unpredictable for an attacker. This frustrates the iterative perturbation process inherent to evasion attacks, enhancing system robustness without compromising accuracy on clean examples.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_12310
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DeepTrust: Multi-Step Classification through Dissimilar Adversarial Representations for Robust Android Malware Detection
Pulido-Cortázar, Daniel
Gibert, Daniel
Manyà, Felip
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Over the last decade, machine learning has been extensively applied to identify malicious Android applications. However, such approaches remain vulnerable against adversarial examples, i.e., examples that are subtly manipulated to fool a machine learning model into making incorrect predictions. This research presents DeepTrust, a novel metaheuristic that arranges flexible classifiers, like deep neural networks, into an ordered sequence where the final decision is made by a single internal model based on conditions activated in cascade. In the Robust Android Malware Detection competition at the 2025 IEEE Conference SaTML, DeepTrust secured the first place and achieved state-of-the-art results, outperforming the next-best competitor by up to 266% under feature-space evasion attacks. This is accomplished while maintaining the highest detection rate on non-adversarial malware and a false positive rate below 1%. The method's efficacy stems from maximizing the divergence of the learned representations among the internal models. By using classifiers inducing fundamentally dissimilar embeddings of the data, the decision space becomes unpredictable for an attacker. This frustrates the iterative perturbation process inherent to evasion attacks, enhancing system robustness without compromising accuracy on clean examples.
title DeepTrust: Multi-Step Classification through Dissimilar Adversarial Representations for Robust Android Malware Detection
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12310