  Adversarial Malware Generation (AMG), the generation of adversarial malware
variants to strengthen Deep Learning (DL)-based malware detectors has emerged
as a crucial tool in the development of proactive cyberdefense. However, the
majority of extant works offer subtle perturbations or additions to executable
files and do not explore full-file obfuscation. In this study, we show that an
open-source encryption tool coupled with a Reinforcement Learning (RL)
framework can successfully obfuscate malware to evade state-of-the-art malware
detection engines and outperform techniques that use advanced modification
methods. Our results show that the proposed method improves the evasion rate
from 27%-49% compared to widely-used state-of-the-art reinforcement
learning-based methods.
