Level Up with RealAEs: Leveraging Domain Constraints in Feature Space to Strengthen Robustness of Android Malware Detection

The vulnerability to adversarial examples remains one major obstacle for Machine Learning (ML)-based Android malware detection. Realistic attacks in the Android malware domain create Realizable Adversarial Examples (RealAEs), i.e., AEs that satisfy the domain constraints of Android malware. Recent studies have shown that using such RealAEs in Adversarial Training (AT) is more effective in defending against realistic attacks than using unrealizable AEs (unRealAEs). This is because RealAEs allow defenders to explore certain pockets in the feature space that are vulnerable to realistic attacks. However, existing defenses commonly generate RealAEs in the problem space, which is known to be time-consuming and impractical for AT. In this paper, we propose to generate RealAEs in the feature space, leading to a simpler and more efficient solution. Our approach is driven by a novel interpretation of Android domain constraints in the feature space. More concretely, our defense first learns feature-space domain constraints by extracting meaningful feature dependencies from data and then applies them to generating feature-space RealAEs during AT. Extensive experiments on DREBIN, a well-known Android malware detector, demonstrate that our new defense outperforms not only unRealAE-based AT but also the state-of-the-art defense that relies on non-uniform perturbations. We further validate the ability of our learned feature-space domain constraints in representing Android malware properties by showing that our feature-space domain constraints can help distinguish RealAEs from unRealAEs.