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Title: From API calls to behavioral graphs: state-clustering and Markov transition features for classical and quantum malware detection (English)
Author: Youssef, Aktham
Author: Zelinka, Ivan
Author: Amer, Eslam
Language: English
Journal: Kybernetika
ISSN: 0023-5954 (print)
ISSN: 1805-949X (online)
Volume: 62
Issue: 3
Year: 2026
Pages: 456-480
Summary lang: English
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Category: math
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Summary: This paper presents a malware-detection pipeline for Windows API-call sequences that converts variable-length traces into fixed-length behavioral features. API tokens are embedded with Word2Vec and clustered with $K$-means to form a shared behavioral state space, and each trace is summarized by first-order Markov transition frequencies ($S^2$ features). Experiments on 150,656 traces with a family-aware split (20\. (English)
Keyword: malware detection
Keyword: API call sequences
Keyword: Word2Vec
Keyword: $K$-means
Keyword: Markov transitions
Keyword: quantum machine learning
Keyword: QSVM
Keyword: VQC
MSC: 68M25
MSC: 68T05
MSC: 68T10
MSC: 81P68
DOI: 10.14736/kyb-2026-3-0456
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Date available: 2026-07-15T16:26:36Z
Last updated: 2026-07-15
Stable URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10338.dmlcz/153683
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