Static and Dynamic Malware Analysis Using CycleGAN Data Augmentation and Deep Learning Techniques
Moses Ashawa, Robert McGregor, Nsikak Pius Owoh, Jude Osamor, John Adejoh · Applied Sciences · 2025
The increasing sophistication of malware and the use of evasive techniques such as obfuscation pose significant challenges to traditional detection methods. This paper presents a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) framework that integrates static and dynamic analysis for malware classification using RGB image representations. Binary and memory dump files are transformed into images to capture structural and behavioural patterns often missed in raw formats. The proposed system comprises two tailored CNN architectures: a static model with four convolutional blocks designed for binary-derived images and a dynamic model with three blocks optimised for noisy memory dump data. To enhance generalisation, we employed Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks (CycleGANs) for cross-domain image augmentation, expanding the dataset to over 74,000 RGB images sourced from benchmark repositories (MaleVis and Dumpware10). The static model achieved 99.45% accuracy and perfect recall, demonstrating high sensitivity with minimal false positives. The dynamic model achieved 99.21% accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the fused approach effectively detects malware variants by learning discriminative visual patterns from both structural and runtime perspectives. This research contributes to a scalable and robust solution for malware classification unlike a single approach.