@inproceedings{a99023459f8446e9a032d24932d55bd1,
title = "Functional cognitive models of malware identification",
abstract = "An important source of constraints on unified theories of cognition is their ability to perform complex tasks that are challenging for humans. Malware reverse-engineering is an important type of analysis in the domain of cyber-security. Rapidly identifying the tasks that a piece of malware is designed to perform is an important part of reverse engineering that is manually performed in practice as it relies heavily on human intuition. We present an automated approach to malware task identification using two different approaches using ACT-R cognitive models. Against a real-world malware dataset, these cognitive models significantly out-perform baseline approaches while demonstrating key cognitive characteristics such as the ability to generalize to new categories and to quickly adapt to a change of environment. Finally, we discuss the implications of our approach for applying cognitive models to complex tasks.",
keywords = "ACT-R, Bayesian models, Decision trees, Functional cognitive models, Malware detection",
author = "Christian Lebiere and Stefano Bennati and Robert Thomson and Paulo Shakarian and Eric Nunes",
note = "Funding Information: This work is supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via Department of the Interior (DOI) contract number D10PC20021. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. The views and conclusions contained hereon are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of IARPA, DOI, or the U.S. Government. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} Proceedings of ICCM 2015 - 13th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling.; 13th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, ICCM 2015 ; Conference date: 09-04-2015 Through 11-04-2015",
year = "2015",
language = "English (US)",
series = "Proceedings of ICCM 2015 - 13th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling",
publisher = "University of Groningen",
pages = "90--95",
editor = "Taatgen, {Niels A.} and {van Vugt}, {Marieke K.} and Borst, {Jelmer P.} and Katja Mehlhorn",
booktitle = "Proceedings of ICCM 2015 - 13th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling",
}