UAP4MA: Leveraging Multi-Agent Bandits to Generate Universal Adversarial Perturbations for Malware Attribution

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) malware group attribution is crucial for cybersecurity, yet current models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Recent approaches for generating universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs) in the malware problem space have exposed substantial security risks, as a single UAP can mislead classification models across a wide range of malware. However, these methods are limited by suboptimal attack effectiveness and efficiency and rely heavily on confidence scores, restricting their practicality. To address these limitations, we propose UAP4MA, the first decision-based, problem-space, black-box UAP generation method tailored specifically for APT malware attribution models. UAP4MA employs a multi-agent Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) framework, where agents collaboratively construct a UAP by applying functionality-preserving transformations chosen from 13 distinct types, leveraging Optimized Initialization, Collaborative Multi-Agents, and Dynamic Agent Strategies to enhance exploration and exploitation. Extensive experiments on our newly released AMG43 dataset and the APTMalware dataset demonstrate UAP4MA's outstanding attack performance, achieving over four times the fooling rate (FR), double the attack success rate (ASR), and an 80% reduction in training time compared to state-of-the-art methods. These results underscore UAP4MA's effectiveness and efficiency, establishing it as a powerful and practical approach for challenging APT attribution models.