dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaMalware Detection based on API Calls: A Reproducibility Study
| Authors | Juhani Merilehto |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | 2601.08725vv1 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08725 |
| License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Abstract
This study independently reproduces the malware detection methodology presented by Felli cious et al. [7], which employs order-invariant API call frequency analysis using Random Forest classification. We utilized the original public dataset (250,533 training samples, 83,511 test samples) and replicated four model variants: Unigram, Bigram, Trigram, and Combined n gram approaches. Our reproduction successfully validated all key findings, achieving F1-scores that exceeded the original results by 0.99% to 2.57% across all models at the optimal API call length of 2,500. The Unigram model achieved F1=0.8717 (original: 0.8631), confirming its ef fectiveness as a lightweight malware detector. Across three independent experimental runs with different random seeds, we observed remarkably consistent results with standard deviations be low 0.5%, demonstrating high reproducibility. This study validates the robustness and scientific rigor of the original methodology while confirming the practical viability of frequency-based API call analysis for malware detection.
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"abstract": "This study independently reproduces the malware detection methodology presented by Felli cious et al. [7], which employs order-invariant API call frequency analysis using Random Forest classification. We utilized the original public dataset (250,533 training samples, 83,511 test samples) and replicated four model variants: Unigram, Bigram, Trigram, and Combined n gram approaches. Our reproduction successfully validated all key findings, achieving F1-scores that exceeded the original results by 0.99% to 2.57% across all models at the optimal API call length of 2,500. The Unigram model achieved F1=0.8717 (original: 0.8631), confirming its ef fectiveness as a lightweight malware detector. Across three independent experimental runs with different random seeds, we observed remarkably consistent results with standard deviations be low 0.5%, demonstrating high reproducibility. This study validates the robustness and scientific rigor of the original methodology while confirming the practical viability of frequency-based API call analysis for malware detection.",
"arxiv_id": "2601.08725",
"authors": [
"Juhani Merilehto"
],
"categories": [
"cs.CR"
],
"license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"title": "Malware Detection based on API Calls: A Reproducibility Study",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08725",
"version": "v1"
},
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