Defending Malware Classification Networks Against Adversarial Perturbations with Non-Negative Weight Restrictions

There is a growing body of literature showing that deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial input modification. Recently this work has been extended from image classification to malware classification over boolean features. In this paper we present several new methods for training restricted networks in this specific domain that are highly effective at preventing adversarial perturbations. We start with a fully adversarially resistant neural network that has hard non-negative weight restrictions and is equivalent to learning a monotonic boolean function and then attempt to relax the constraints to improve classifier accuracy.