TCN-ATT: A Non-recurrent Model for Sequence-Based Malware Detection

Malware detection based on API call sequences is widely used for the ability to model program behaviours. But RNN-based models for this task usually have bottlenecks in efficiency and accuracy due to their recurrent structure. In this paper, we propose a Temporal Convolutional Network with ATTention (TCN-ATT) architecture, which processes sequences with high parallelization and is robust to sequence length. The proposed TCN-ATT consists of three components: (1) a TCN module which processes sequence with convolutional structure, (2) an attention layer to select effective features and (3) a split-and-combine mechanism to fit inputs with various size. A formalized deduplication method is also proposed to reduce redundancy with less information loss. According to our experiments, the proposed model reaches an accuracy of 98.60% and reduces time cost by over 60% compared with existing RNN-based models.