Android-manifest extraction and labeling method for malware compilation and dataset creation

Malware is a nuisance for smartphone users. The impact is detrimental to smartphone users if the smartphone is infected by malware. Malware identification is not an easy process for ordinary users due to its deeply concealed dangers in application package kit (APK) files available in the Android Play Store. In this paper, the challenges of creating malware datasets are discussed. Long before a malware classification process and model can be built, the need for datasets with representative features for most types of malwares has to be addressed systematically. Only after a quality data set is available can a quality classification model be obtained using machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL) algorithms. The entire malware classification process is a full pipeline process and sub processes. The authors purposefully focus on the process of building quality malware datasets, not on ML itself, because implementing ML requires another effort after the reliable dataset is fully built. The overall step in creating the malware dataset starts with the extraction of the Android Manifest from the APK file set and ends with the labeling method for all the extracted APK files. The key contribution of this paper is on how to generate datasets systematically from any APK file

AndroSAT: Security Analysis Tool for Android Applications

ABSTRACT AndroSAT: Security Analysis Tool for Android Applications With about 1.5 million Android device activations per day and billions of applications installation from Google Play, Android is becoming one of the most widely used operating systems for smartphones and tablets. Besides typical personal usages, Android mobile devices are also being integrated into enterprises, government organizations, and military networks. Consequently, these devices hold valuable sensitive information which makes them face the same level of malicious attacks that have targeted the desktop environments over the past three decades. In this thesis, we present AndroSAT, a Security Analysis Tool for Android applications. The developed framework allows us to efficiently experiment with different security aspects of Android apps through the integration of (i) a static analysis module that scans Android apps for malicious patterns. The static analysis process involves several steps such as n-gram analysis of dex files, de-compilation of the app, pattern search, and analysis of the AndroidManifest file; (ii) a dynamic analysis sandbox that executes Android apps in a controlled virtual environment which logs low-level interactions with the operating system. The effectiveness of the developed framework is confirmed by testing it on popular apps collected from F-Droid, and malware samples obtained from a third party and the Android Malware Genome Project dataset. As a case study, we show how the analysis reports obtained from AndroSAT can be used for studying the frequency of use of different Android permissions and dynamic operations and detection of Android malware

Understanding Android Obfuscation Techniques: A Large-Scale Investigation in the Wild

In this paper, we seek to better understand Android obfuscation and depict a holistic view of the usage of obfuscation through a large-scale investigation in the wild. In particular, we focus on four popular obfuscation approaches: identifier renaming, string encryption, Java reflection, and packing. To obtain the meaningful statistical results, we designed efficient and lightweight detection models for each obfuscation technique and applied them to our massive APK datasets (collected from Google Play, multiple third-party markets, and malware databases). We have learned several interesting facts from the result. For example, malware authors use string encryption more frequently, and more apps on third-party markets than Google Play are packed. We are also interested in the explanation of each finding. Therefore we carry out in-depth code analysis on some Android apps after sampling. We believe our study will help developers select the most suitable obfuscation approach, and in the meantime help researchers improve code analysis systems in the right direction

A federated approach to Android malware classification through Perm-Maps

In the last decades, mobile-based apps have been increasingly used in several application fields for many purposes involving a high number of human activities. Unfortunately, in addition to this, the number of cyber-attacks related to mobile platforms is increasing day-by-day. However, although advances in Artificial Intelligence science have allowed addressing many aspects of the problem, malware classification tasks are still challenging. For this reason, the following paper aims to propose new special features, called permission maps (Perm-Maps), which combine information related to the Android permissions and their corresponding severity levels. Such features have proven to be very effective in classifying different malware families through the usage of a convolutional neural network. Also, the advantages introduced by the Perm-Maps have been enhanced by a training process based on a federated logic. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves up to a 3% improvement in average accuracy with respect to J48 trees and Naive Bayes classifier, and up to 16% compared to multi-layer perceptron classifier. Furthermore, the combined use of Perm-Maps and federated logic allows dealing with unbalanced training datasets with low computational efforts

Evaluation of Android anti-malware resistance against transformation attacks

Android being most popular and user-friendly is targeted by most of the malware authors. The malware authors use various transformation techniques to create different variants of malwares. Different transformation techniques such as obfuscation, repackaging, renaming are used mostly. Many anti-malwares are developed to secure the Android devices. Android does not offer file access permissions to all the applications installed. Thus anti-malwares may not provide complete security to the Android devices. In this paper, many such different techniques are presented that can be used to evaluate different anti-malwares

Android application forensics: A survey of obfuscation, obfuscation detection and deobfuscation techniques and their impact on investigations

Android obfuscation techniques include not only classic code obfuscation techniques that were adapted to Android, but also obfuscation methods that target the Android platform specifically. This work examines the status-quo of Android obfuscation, obfuscation detection and deobfuscation. Specifically, it first summarizes obfuscation approaches that are commonly used by app developers for code optimization, to protect their software against code theft and code tampering but are also frequently misused by malware developers to circumvent anti-malware products. Secondly, the article focuses on obfuscation detection techniques and presents various available tools and current research. Thirdly, deobfuscation (which aims at reinstating the original state before obfuscation) is discussed followed by a brief discussion how this impacts forensic investigation. We conclude that although obfuscation is widely used in Android app development (benign and malicious), available tools and the practices on how to deal with obfuscation are not standardized, and so are inherently lacking from a forensic standpoint