JavaScript Malware Detection Using Locality Sensitive Hashing

Paper in proceeding, 2020

© 2020, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing. In this paper, we explore the idea of using locality sensitive hashes as input features to a feed-forward neural network with the goal of detecting JavaScript malware through static analysis. An experiment is conducted using a dataset containing 1.5M evenly distributed benign and malicious samples provided by the anti-malware company Cyren. Four different locality sensitive hashing algorithms are tested and evaluated: Nilsimsa, ssdeep, TLSH, and SDHASH. The results show a high prediction accuracy, as well as low false positive and negative rates. These results show that LSH based neural networks are a competitive option against other state-of-the-art JavaScript malware classification solutions.