Domain Constraints in Feature Space: Strengthening Robustness of Android Malware Detection against Realizable Adversarial Examples

Strengthening the robustness of machine learning-based Android malware detectors in the real world requires incorporating realizable adversarial examples (RealAEs), i.e., AEs that satisfy the domain constraints of Android malware. However, existing work focuses on generating RealAEs in the problem space, which is known to be time-consuming and impractical for adversarial training. 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 malware properties in the feature space. More concretely, we extract feature-space domain constraints by learning meaningful feature dependencies from data and applying them by constructing a robust feature space. Our experiments on DREBIN, a well-known Android malware detector, demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art defense, Sec-SVM, against realistic gradient- and query-based attacks. Additionally, we demonstrate that generating feature-space RealAEs is faster than generating problem-space RealAEs, indicating its high applicability in adversarial training. We further validate the ability of our learned feature-space domain constraints in representing the Android malware properties by showing that (i) re-training detectors with our feature-space RealAEs largely improves model performance on similar problem-space RealAEs and (ii) using our feature-space domain constraints can help distinguish RealAEs from unrealizable AEs (unRealAEs).