Recently, there has been a huge rise in malware growth, which creates a significant security threat to organizations and individuals. Despite the incessant efforts of cybersecurity research to defend against malware threats, malware developers discover new ways to evade these defense techniques. Traditional static and dynamic analysis methods are ineffective in identifying new malware and pose high overhead in terms of memory and time. Typical machine learning approaches that train a classifier based on handcrafted features are also not sufficiently potent against these evasive techniques and require more efforts due to feature-engineering. Recent malware detectors indicate performance degradation due to class imbalance in malware datasets. To resolve these challenges, this work adopts a visualization-based method, where malware binaries are depicted as two-dimensional images and classified by a deep learning model. We propose an efficient malware detection system based on deep learning. The system uses a reweighted class-balanced loss function in the final classification layer of the DenseNet model to achieve significant performance improvements in classifying malware by handling imbalanced data issues. Comprehensive experiments performed on four benchmark malware datasets show that the proposed approach can detect new malware samples with higher accuracy (98.23% for the Malimg dataset, 98.46% for the BIG 2015 dataset, 98.21% for the MaleVis dataset, and 89.48% for the unseen Malicia dataset) and reduced false-positive rates when compared with conventional malware mitigation techniques while maintaining low computational time. The proposed malware detection solution is also reliable and effective against obfuscation attacks.

The Rubik’s cube is a prototypical combinatorial puzzle that has a large state space with a single goal state. The goal state is unlikely to be retrieved using orders of randomly generated moves, posing unique challenges for machine learning. The proposed work is above to solve the Rubik’s cube with recursion and DeepCubeA, a deep reinforcement learning approach that learns how to solve increasingly difficult states in reverse from the goal state without any specific domain knowledge. DeepCubeA solves 100% of all test patterns, finding a shortest path to the goal state 60.3% of the time. Deep Cube A generalizes to other combinatorial puzzles andis able to solve the 15 puzzle, 24 puzzle, 35 puzzle, 48 puzzle, Lights Out and Sokoban, finding a shortest path in the majority of verifiable cases. These models were trained with 1 4 GPUs and 20 30 CPUs. This varies throughout training as the training is often stopped and started again to make room for other processes. Further our experimentation compares the results of Rubik’s cube solving among both recursion and DeepCubeA and also with the state of art models. Later, we intend to develop a new deep learning model with an application.