AndroDialysis: Analysis of Android Intent Effectiveness in Malware Detection

© 2016 Elsevier Ltd The wide popularity of Android systems has been accompanied by increase in the number of malware targeting these systems. This is largely due to the open nature of the Android framework that facilitates the incorporation of third-party applications running on top of any Android device. Inter-process communication is one of the most notable features of the Android framework as it allows the reuse of components across process boundaries. This mechanism is used as gateway to access different sensitive services in the Android framework. In the Android platform, this communication system is usually driven by a late runtime binding messaging object known as Intent. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of Android Intents (explicit and implicit) as a distinguishing feature for identifying malicious applications. We show that Intents are semantically rich features that are able to encode the intentions of malware when compared to other well-studied features such as permissions. We also argue that this type of feature is not the ultimate solution. It should be used in conjunction with other known features. We conducted experiments using a dataset containing 7406 applications that comprise 1846 clean and 5560 infected applications. The results show detection rate of 91% using Android Intent against 83% using Android permission. Additionally, experiment on combination of both features results in detection rate of 95.5%

Android malware detection based on image-based features and machine learning techniques

Bakour, Khaled/0000-0003-3327-2822WOS:000545934700001In this paper, a malware classification model has been proposed for detecting malware samples in the Android environment. The proposed model is based on converting some files from the source of the Android applications into grayscale images. Some image-based local features and global features, including four different types of local features and three different types of global features, have been extracted from the constructed grayscale image datasets and used for training the proposed model. To the best of our knowledge, this type of features is used for the first time in the Android malware detection domain. Moreover, the bag of visual words algorithm has been used to construct one feature vector from the descriptors of the local feature extracted from each image. The extracted local and global features have been used for training multiple machine learning classifiers including Random forest, k-nearest neighbors, Decision Tree, Bagging, AdaBoost and Gradient Boost. The proposed method obtained a very high classification accuracy reached 98.75% with a typical computational time does not exceed 0.018 s for each sample. The results of the proposed model outperformed the results of all compared state-of-art models in term of both classification accuracy and computational time

Deep Learning-Based Attack Detection and Classification in Android Devices.

The increasing proliferation of Androidbased devices, which currently dominate the market with a staggering 72% global market share, has made them a prime target for attackers. Consequently, the detection of Android malware has emerged as a critical research area. Both academia and industry have explored various approaches to develop robust and efficient solutions for Android malware detection and classification, yet it remains an ongoing challenge. In this study, we present a supervised learning technique that demonstrates promising results in Android malware detection. The key to our approach lies in the creation of a comprehensive labeled dataset, comprising over 18,000 samples classified into five distinct categories: Adware, Banking, SMS, Riskware, and Benign applications. The effectiveness of our proposed model is validated using well-established datasets such as CICMalDroid2020, CICMalDroid2017, and CICAndMal2017. Comparing our results with state-of-the-art techniques in terms of precision, recall, efficiency, and other relevant factors, our approach outperforms other semi-supervised methods in specific parameters. However, we acknowledge that our model does not exhibit significant deviations when compared to alternative approaches concerning certain aspects. Overall, our research contributes to the ongoing efforts in the development of advanced techniques for Android malware detection and classification. We believe that our findings will inspire further investigations, leading to enhanced security measures and protection for Android devices in the face of evolving threats.Partial funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málag

Android-haittaohjelmien tunnistaminen koneoppimismenetelmin

Haittaohjelmien ja niiden eri variaatioiden sekä (haitta)ohjelmanäytteiden päivittäisen valtavan määrän myötä manuaalinen ohjelmanäytteiden analysointi ja kategorisointi ei ole enää ajankäytöllisesti järkevää tai edes mahdollista. Koneoppimismenetelmin pyritään automatisoimaan ohjelmanäytteiden kategorisointia mahdollisimman pitkälle, jolloin haittaohjelmia analysoivat tutkijat voivat keskittyä erityisesti valittujen kohteiden yksityiskohtaisempaan tarkasteluun. Lisäksi entuudestaan tuntemattomien haittaohjelmien tunnistamiseen voidaan käyttää erilaisia koneoppimismenetelmiä. Mobiililaitteiden yleistymisen myötä haittaohjelmien laatijat ovat ottaneet kohteekseen myös erilaiset älylaitteet, kuten älypuhelimet. Tässä tutkielmassa tarkastellaan koneoppimismenetelmien soveltamista Android-haittaohjelmien automaattiseen tunnistamiseen ja kategorisointiin. Muuttujina ovat Androidin järjestelmäoikeudet. Menetelmiksi valittiin k:n lähimmän naapurin luokittelumenetelmä, päätöspuu sekä satunnaismetsä. Tulokset olivat hyviä, varsinkin satunnaismetsällä

Mining permission patterns for contrasting clean and malicious android applications

An Android application uses a permission system to regulate the access to system resources and users\u27 privacy-relevant information. Existing works have demonstrated several techniques to study the required permissions declared by the developers, but little attention has been paid towards used permissions. Besides, no specific permission combination is identified to be effective for malware detection. To fill these gaps, we have proposed a novel pattern mining algorithm to identify a set of contrast permission patterns that aim to detect the difference between clean and malicious applications. A benchmark malware dataset and a dataset of 1227 clean applications has been collected by us to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Valuable findings are obtained by analyzing the returned contrast permission patterns. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Security and privacy of users\u27 personal Information on smartphones

 This research investigated the proliferation of malicious applications on smartphones and a framework that can efficiently detect and classify such applications based on behavioural patterns was proposed. Additionally the causes and impact of unauthorised disclosure of personal information by clean applications were examined and countermeasures to protect smartphone users’ privacy were proposed

Feature Selection on Permissions, Intents and APIs for Android Malware Detection

Malicious applications pose an enormous security threat to mobile computing devices. Currently 85% of all smartphones run Android, Google’s open-source operating system, making that platform the primary threat vector for malware attacks. Android is a platform that hosts roughly 99% of known malware to date, and is the focus of most research efforts in mobile malware detection due to its open source nature. One of the main tools used in this effort is supervised machine learning. While a decade of work has made a lot of progress in detection accuracy, there is an obstacle that each stream of research is forced to overcome, feature selection, i.e., determining which attributes of Android are most effective as inputs into machine learning models. This dissertation aims to address that problem by providing the community with an exhaustive analysis of the three primary types of Android features used by researchers: Permissions, Intents and API Calls. The intent of the report is not to describe a best performing feature set or a best performing machine learning model, nor to explain why certain Permissions, Intents or API Calls get selected above others, but rather to provide a holistic methodology to help guide feature selection for Android malware detection. The experiments used eleven different feature selection techniques covering filter methods, wrapper methods and embedded methods. Each feature selection technique was applied to seven different datasets based on the seven combinations available of Permissions, Intents and API Calls. Each of those seven datasets are from a base set of 119k Android apps. All of the result sets were then validated against three different machine learning models, Random Forest, SVM and a Neural Net, to test applicability across algorithm type. The experiments show that using a combination of Permissions, Intents and API Calls produced higher accuracy than using any of those alone or in any other combination and that feature selection should be performed on the combined dataset, not by feature type and then combined. The data also shows that, in general, a feature set size of 200 or more attributes is required for optimal results. Finally, the feature selection methods Relief, Correlation-based Feature Selection (CFS) and Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) using a Neural Net are not satisfactory approaches for Android malware detection work. Based on the proposed methodology and experiments, this research provided insights into feature selection – a significant but often overlooked issue in Android malware detection. We believe the results reported herein is an important step for effective feature evaluation and selection in assisting malware detection especially for datasets with a large number of features. The methodology also has the potential to be applied to similar malware detection tasks or even in broader domains such as pattern recognition

Relative preference-based recommender systems

This study investigates the problem of making recommendations to users, such as recommending a movie. Several novel models are proposed to make accurate recommendations by analyzing both the explicit and implicit data. Experiment results have confirmed improvements over state-of-the-art models