  Beyond its highly publicized victories in Go, there have been numerous
successful applications of deep learning in information retrieval, computer
vision and speech recognition. In cybersecurity, an increasing number of
companies have become excited about the potential of deep learning, and have
started to use it for various security incidents, the most popular being
malware detection. These companies assert that deep learning (DL) could help
turn the tide in the battle against malware infections. However, deep neural
networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial samples, a flaw that plagues most
if not all statistical learning models. Recent research has demonstrated that
those with malicious intent can easily circumvent deep learning-powered malware
detection by exploiting this flaw.
  In order to address this problem, previous work has developed various defense
mechanisms that either augmenting training data or enhance model's complexity.
However, after a thorough analysis of the fundamental flaw in DNNs, we discover
that the effectiveness of current defenses is limited and, more importantly,
cannot provide theoretical guarantees as to their robustness against
adversarial sampled-based attacks. As such, we propose a new adversary
resistant technique that obstructs attackers from constructing impactful
adversarial samples by randomly nullifying features within samples. In this
work, we evaluate our proposed technique against a real world dataset with
14,679 malware variants and 17,399 benign programs. We theoretically validate
the robustness of our technique, and empirically show that our technique
significantly boosts DNN robustness to adversarial samples while maintaining
high accuracy in classification. To demonstrate the general applicability of
our proposed method, we also conduct experiments using the MNIST and CIFAR-10
datasets, generally used in image recognition research.
