VOLTRON: Detecting Unknown Malware Using Graph-Based Zero-Shot Learning


Creative Commons License

Akdeniz M. T., Yesilkaya Z., Kose I. E., ÜNAL İ., ŞEN S.

18th International Symposium on Foundations and Practice of Security, FPS 2025, Brest, Fransa, 25 - 27 Kasım 2025, cilt.16403 LNCS, ss.187-207, (Tam Metin Bildiri) identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Tam Metin Bildiri
  • Cilt numarası: 16403 LNCS
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1007/978-3-032-20026-6_11
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Brest
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Fransa
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.187-207
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: Android malware detection, Siamese Neural Network, Variational Graph Auto-Encoder, Zero-day, Zero-shot learning
  • Açık Arşiv Koleksiyonu: AVESİS Açık Erişim Koleksiyonu
  • Hacettepe Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

The persistent threat of Android malware presents a serious challenge to the security of millions of users globally. While many machine learning-based methods have been developed to detect these threats, their reliance on large labeled datasets limits their effectiveness against emerging, previously unseen malware families, for which labeled data is scarce or nonexistent. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel zero-shot learning framework that combines Variational Graph Auto-Encoders (VGAE) with Siamese Neural Networks (SNN) to identify malware without needing prior examples of specific malware families. Our approach leverages graph-based representations of Android applications, enabling the model to detect subtle structural differences between benign and malicious software, even in the absence of labeled data for new threats. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art MaMaDroid, especially in zero-day malware detection. Our model achieves 96.24% accuracy and 95.20% recall for unknown malware families, highlighting its robustness against evolving Android threats.