Malware development has significantly increased recently, posing a serious security risk to both consumers and businesses. Malware developers continually find new ways to circumvent security research’s ongoing efforts to guard against malware attacks. Malware Classification (MC) entails labeling a class of malware to a specific sample, while malware detection merely entails finding malware without identifying which kind of malware it is. There are two main reasons why the most popular MC techniques have a low classification rate. First, Finding and developing accurate features requires highly specialized domain expertise. Second, a data imbalance that makes it challenging to classify and correctly identify malware. Furthermore, the proposed malware classification (MC) method consists of the following five steps: (i) Dataset preparation: 2D malware images are created from the malware binary files; (ii) Visualized Malware Pre-processing: the visual malware images need to be scaled to fit the CNN model’s input size; (iii) Feature extraction: both hand-engineering (Tamura) and deep learning (GoogLeNet) techniques are used to extract the features in this step; (iv) Classification: to perform malware classification, we employed k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM). The proposed method is tested on a standard Malimg unbalanced dataset. The accuracy rate of the proposed method was extremely high, making it the most efficient option available. The proposed method’s accuracy rate was outperformed both the Hand-crafted feature and Deep Feature techniques, at 95.42 and 96.84 percent.

Steganography is the technique for secretly hiding messages in media such as text, audio, image, and video without being discovered. Image is one of the most essential media for concealing data, making it hard to identify hidden data not visible to the human eye. In general, the cover image and the encrypted image are symmetrical in terms of dimension size, resolution, and qualities. This makes the difference difficult to perceive with the human eye. As a result, distinguishing between the two symmetric images required the development of methods. Steganalysis is a technique for identifying hidden messages embedded in digital material without having to know the embedding algorithm or the “non-stego” image. Due to their enormous feature vector dimension, which requires more time to calculate, the performance of most existing image steganalysis classification (ISC) techniques is still restricted. Therefore, in this research, we present a steganalysis classification method based on one of the texture features chosen, such as segmentation-based fractal texture analysis (SFTA), local binary pattern (LBP), and gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM). The classifiers employed include Gaussian discriminant analysis (GDA) and naïve Bayes (NB). We used a public database in our proposed method and applied it to IStego100K datasets to be able to assess its performance. The experimental results reveal that in all classifiers, the SFTA feature surpassed all of the texture features, making it a great texture feature for image steganalysis classification. In terms of feature dimension and classification accuracy (CA), a comparison was made between the suggested SFTA-based GDA approach and various current ISC methods. The outcomes of the comparison are obvious show that the proposed method surpasses current methods.

A significant quantity of malware is created on purpose every day. Users of smartphones and computer networks now mostly worry about malware. These days, malware detection is a major concern in the cybersecurity area. Several factors can impact malware detection performance, such as inappropriate features and classifiers, extensive domain knowledge, imbalanced data environments, computational complexity, and resource usage. A significant number of existing malware detection methods have been impacted by these factors. Therefore, in this paper, we will first identify and determine the best features and classifiers and then use them in order to propose the malware detection method. The comparative strategy and proposed malware detection procedure consist of four basic steps: malware transformation (converting images of malware from RGB to grayscale), feature extraction (using the ResNet-50, DenseNet-201, GoogLeNet, AlexNet, and SqueezeNet models), feature selection (using PCA method), classification (including GDA, KNN, logistic, SVM, RF, and ensemble learning), and evaluation (using accuracy and error evaluation metrics). Unbalanced Malimg datasets are used in experiments to validate the efficacy of the results that were obtained. According to the comparison findings, KNN is the best machine learning classifier. It outperformed the other classifiers in the Malimg datasets in terms of both accuracy and error. In addition, DenseNet201 is the best pretrained model in the Malimg dataset. Therefore, the proposed DenseNet201-KNN methods had an accuracy rate of 96% and a minimal error rate of 3.07%. The proposed methods surpass existing state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed feature extraction is computationally quicker than most other methods since it uses a lightweight design and fewer feature vector dimensions.

The security of a computer system can be harmed by specific applications, such as malware. Malware comprises unwanted, dangerous enemies that aim to compromise the security and generate significant loss. Consequently, Malware Detection (MD) and Malware Classification (MC) has emerged as a key issue for the cybersecurity society. MD only involves locating malware without determining what kind of malware it is, but MC comprises assigning a class of malware to a particular sample. Recently, a few techniques for analyzing malware quickly have been put out. However, there remain numerous difficulties, such as the low classification accuracy of samples from related malware families, the computational complexity, and consumption of resources. These difficulties make detecting and classifying malware very challenging. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed an efficient malware detection and classification technique that combines Segmentation-based Fractal Texture Analysis (SFTA) and Gaussian Discriminant Analysis (GDA). The outcomes of the experiment demonstrate that the SFTA-GDA produces a high classification rate. There are three main steps involved in our malware analysis, namely: (i) malware conversion; (ii) feature extraction; and (iii) classification. We initially convert the RGB malware images into grayscale malware images for effective malware analysis. The SFTA and Gabor features are then extracted from gray-scale images in the feature extraction step. Finally, the classification is carried out by GDA and Naive Bayes (NB). The proposed method is evaluated on a common MaleVis dataset. The proposed SFTA-GDA is the effective choice since it produces the highest accuracy rate across all families of the MaleVis Database. Experimental findings indicate that the accuracy rate was 98%, which is higher than the overall accuracy from the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Three frequent factors such as low classification accuracy, computational complexity, and resource consumption have an impact on malware evaluation methods. These challenges are exacerbated by elements such as unbalanced data environments and specific feature generation. To address these challenges, we aim to identify optimal texture features and classifiers for effective malware detection. The article outlines a method that consists of four stages: malware conversion to grayscale, feature extraction using (segmentation-based fractal texture analysis (SFTA), Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Haralick, Gabor, and Tamura), classification using (Gaussian Discriminant Analysis (GDA), k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Logistic, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Extreme Learning Machine (Ensemble)), and finally the evaluation. Using the Malimg imbalanced and MaleVis balanced datasets, we assess classifier performance and feature effectiveness. Comparative analysis indicates that KNN outperforms other classifiers in terms of Accuracy, Error, F1, and Precision, while SVM and RF as runners-up. Gabor performs better in MaleVis, whereas the SFTA feature performs better under the Malimg dataset. The proposed SFTA-KNN and Gabor-KNN methods achieve 96.29% and 98.02% accuracy, respectively, surpassing current state-of-the-art approaches. Additionally, higher computing performance is achieved by using fewer dimensions when employing our feature extraction method.

Image watermarking is one of many methods for preventing unauthorized alterations to digital images. The major goal of the research is to find and identify photos that include a watermark, regardless of the method used to add the watermark or the shape of the watermark. As a result, this study advocated using the best Gabor features and classifiers to improve the accuracy of image watermarking identification. As classifiers, discriminant analysis (DA) and random forests are used. The DA and random forest use mean squared energy feature, mean amplitude feature, and combined feature vector as inputs for classification. The performance of the classifiers is evaluated using a variety of feature sets, and the best results are achieved. In order to assess the performance of the proposed method, we use a public database. VOC2008 is a public database that we use. The findings reveal that our proposed method’s DA classifier with integrated features had the greatest TPR of 93.71 and the lowest FNR of 6.29. This shows that the performance outcomes of the proposed approach are consistent. The proposed method has the advantages of being able to find images with the watermark in any database and not requiring a specific type or algorithm for embedding the watermark.