Nowadays, ransomware is considered one of the most critical cyber-malware categories. In recent years various malware detection and classification approaches have been proposed to analyze and explore malicious software precisely. Malware originators implement innovative techniques to bypass existing security solutions. This paper introduces an efficient End-to-End Ransomware Detection System (E2E-RDS) that comprehensively utilizes existing Ransomware Detection (RD) approaches. E2E-RDS considers reverse engineering the ransomware code to parse its features and extract the important ones for prediction purposes, as in the case of static-based RD. Moreover, E2E-RDS can keep the ransomware in its executable format, convert it to an image, and then analyze it, as in the case of vision-based RD. In the static-based RD approach, the extracted features are forwarded to eight various ML models to test their detection efficiency. In the vision-based RD approach, the binary executable files of the benign and ransomware apps are converted into a 2D visual (color and gray) images. Then, these images are forwarded to 19 different Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models while exploiting the substantial advantages of Fine-Tuning (FT) and Transfer Learning (TL) processes to differentiate ransomware apps from benign apps. The main benefit of the vision-based approach is that it can efficiently detect and identify ransomware with high accuracy without using data augmentation or complicated feature extraction processes. Extensive simulations and performance analyses using various evaluation metrics for the proposed E2E-RDS were investigated using a newly collected balanced dataset that composes 500 benign and 500 ransomware apps. The obtained outcomes demonstrate that the static-based RD approach using the AB (Ada Boost) model achieved high classification accuracy compared to other examined ML models, which reached 97%. While the vision-based RD approach achieved high classification accuracy, reaching 99.5% for the FT ResNet50 CNN model. It is declared that the vision-based RD approach is more cost-effective, powerful, and efficient in detecting ransomware than the static-based RD approach by avoiding feature engineering processes. Overall, E2E-RDS is a versatile solution for end-to-end ransomware detection that has proven its high efficiency from computational and accuracy perspectives, making it a promising solution for real-time ransomware detection in various systems.
Keywords: cybersecurity attacks; deep learning; fine-tuning; machine learning; malware; ransomware; static analysis; transfer learning; vision-based detection system.