Detection of Malicious Activities in Internet of Things Environment Based on Binary Visualization and Machine Intelligence

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasingly deployed for different purposes such as data sensing, collecting and controlling. IoT improves user experiences by allowing a large number of smart devices to connect and share information. Many existing malware attacks, targeted at traditional computers connected to the Internet, may also be directed at IoT devices. Therefore, efficient protection at IoT devices could save millions of internet users from malicious activities. However, existing malware detection approaches suffer from high computational complexity. In this study, we propose a more accurate and fast model for detecting malware in the IoT environment. We introduce a Malware Threat Hunting System (MTHS) in the proposed model. MTHS first converts malware binary into a color image and then conducts the machine or deep learning analysis for efficient malware detection. We finally prepare a baseline to compare the performance of MTHS with traditional state-of-the-art malware detection approaches. We conduct experiments on two public datasets of Windows and Android software. The experimental results indicate that the response time and the detection accuracy of MTHS are better than those of previous machine learning and deep learning approaches.