Interpretable Machine Learning for Detection and Classification of Ransomware Families Based on API Calls

Ransomware has appeared as one of the major global threats in recent days. The alarming increasing rate of ransomware attacks and new ransomware variants intrigue the researchers to constantly examine the distinguishing traits of ransomware and refine their detection strategies. Application Programming Interface (API) is a way for one program to collaborate with another; API calls are the medium by which they communicate. Ransomware uses this strategy to interact with the OS and makes a significantly higher number of calls in different sequences to ask for taking action. This research work utilizes the frequencies of different API calls to detect and classify ransomware families. First, a Web-Crawler is developed to automate collecting the Windows Portable Executable (PE) files of 15 different ransomware families. By extracting different frequencies of 68 API calls, we develop our dataset in the first phase of the two-phase feature engineering process. After selecting the most significant features in the second phase of the feature engineering process, we deploy six Supervised Machine Learning models: Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Stochastic Gradient Descent, K-Nearest Neighbor, and Support Vector Machine. Then, the performances of all the classifiers are compared to select the best model. The results reveal that Logistic Regression can efficiently classify ransomware into their corresponding families securing 99.15% accuracy. Finally, instead of relying on the 'Black box' characteristic of the Machine Learning models, we present the interpretability of our best-performing model using SHAP values to ascertain the transparency and trustworthiness of the model's prediction.