scholarly journals Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Networks for Android Malware Detection using Callback-Aware Caller-Callee Graphs

Author(s):  
Vinayaka K V ◽  
Jaidhar C D

<pre> The popularity of the Android Operating System in the smartphone market has given rise to lots of Android malware. To accurately detect these malware, many of the existing works use machine learning and deep learning-based methods, in which feature extraction methods were used to extract fixed-size feature vectors using the files present inside the Android Application Package (APK). Recently, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based methods applied on the Function Call Graph (FCG) extracted from the APK are gaining momentum in Android malware detection, as GCNs are effective at learning tasks on variable-sized graphs such as FCG, and FCG sufficiently captures the structure and behaviour of an APK. However, the FCG lacks information about callback methods as the Android Application Programming Interface (API) is event-driven. This paper proposes enhancing the FCG to eFCG (enhanced-FCG) using the callback information extracted using Android Framework Space Analysis to overcome this limitation. Further, we add permission - API method relationships to the eFCG. The eFCG is reduced using node contraction based on the classes to get R-eFCG (Reduced eFCG) to improve the generalisation ability of the Android malware detection model. The eFCG and R-eFCG are then given as the inputs to the Heterogeneous GCN models to determine whether the APK file from which they are extracted is malicious or not. To test the effectiveness of eFCG and R-eFCG, we conducted an ablation study by removing their various components. To determine the optimal neighbourhood size for GCN, we experimented with a varying number of GCN layers and found that the Android malware detection model using R-eFCG with all its components with four convolution layers achieved maximum accuracy of 96.28%.</pre>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vinayaka K V ◽  
Jaidhar C D

<pre> The popularity of the Android Operating System in the smartphone market has given rise to lots of Android malware. To accurately detect these malware, many of the existing works use machine learning and deep learning-based methods, in which feature extraction methods were used to extract fixed-size feature vectors using the files present inside the Android Application Package (APK). Recently, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based methods applied on the Function Call Graph (FCG) extracted from the APK are gaining momentum in Android malware detection, as GCNs are effective at learning tasks on variable-sized graphs such as FCG, and FCG sufficiently captures the structure and behaviour of an APK. However, the FCG lacks information about callback methods as the Android Application Programming Interface (API) is event-driven. This paper proposes enhancing the FCG to eFCG (enhanced-FCG) using the callback information extracted using Android Framework Space Analysis to overcome this limitation. Further, we add permission - API method relationships to the eFCG. The eFCG is reduced using node contraction based on the classes to get R-eFCG (Reduced eFCG) to improve the generalisation ability of the Android malware detection model. The eFCG and R-eFCG are then given as the inputs to the Heterogeneous GCN models to determine whether the APK file from which they are extracted is malicious or not. To test the effectiveness of eFCG and R-eFCG, we conducted an ablation study by removing their various components. To determine the optimal neighbourhood size for GCN, we experimented with a varying number of GCN layers and found that the Android malware detection model using R-eFCG with all its components with four convolution layers achieved maximum accuracy of 96.28%.</pre>


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Wang ◽  
Dafang Zhang ◽  
Xin Su ◽  
Wenjia Li

In recent years, Android malware has continued to grow at an alarming rate. More recent malicious apps’ employing highly sophisticated detection avoidance techniques makes the traditional machine learning based malware detection methods far less effective. More specifically, they cannot cope with various types of Android malware and have limitation in detection by utilizing a single classification algorithm. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach in this paper that leverages parallel machine learning and information fusion techniques for better Android malware detection, which is named Mlifdect. To implement this approach, we first extract eight types of features from static analysis on Android apps and build two kinds of feature sets after feature selection. Then, a parallel machine learning detection model is developed for speeding up the process of classification. Finally, we investigate the probability analysis based and Dempster-Shafer theory based information fusion approaches which can effectively obtain the detection results. To validate our method, other state-of-the-art detection works are selected for comparison with real-world Android apps. The experimental results demonstrate that Mlifdect is capable of achieving higher detection accuracy as well as a remarkable run-time efficiency compared to the existing malware detection solutions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Xin Su ◽  
Qingbo Gong ◽  
Yi Zheng ◽  
Xuchong Liu ◽  
Kuan-Ching Li

Recently, brain-machine interfacing is very popular that link humans and artificial devices through brain signals which lead to corresponding mobile application as supplementary. The Android platform has developed rapidly because of its good user experience and openness. Meanwhile, these characteristics of this platform, which cause the amazing pace of Android malware, pose a great threat to this platform and data correction during signal transmission of brain-machine interfacing. Many previous works employ various behavioral characteristics to analyze Android application (or app) and detect Android malware to protect signal data secure. However, with the development of Android app, category of Android app tends to be diverse, and the Android malware behavior tends to be complex. This situation makes existing Android malware detections complicated and inefficient. In this paper, we propose a broad analysis, gathering as many behavior characteristics of an app as possible and compare these behavior characteristics in several metrics. First, we extract static and dynamic behavioral characteristic from Android app in an automatic manner. Second, we explain the decision we made in each kind of behavioral characteristic we choose for Android app analysis and Android malware detection. Third, we design a detailed experiment, which compare the efficiency of each kind of behavior characteristic in different aspects. The results of experiment also show Android malware detection performance of these behavior characteristics combine with well-known machine learning algorithms.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Yang Yang ◽  
Xuehui Du ◽  
Zhi Yang ◽  
Xing Liu

The openness of Android operating system not only brings convenience to users, but also leads to the attack threat from a large number of malicious applications (apps). Thus malware detection has become the research focus in the field of mobile security. In order to solve the problem of more coarse-grained feature selection and larger feature loss of graph structure existing in the current detection methods, we put forward a method named DGCNDroid for Android malware detection, which is based on the deep graph convolutional network. Our method starts by generating a function call graph for the decompiled Android application. Then the function call subgraph containing the sensitive application programming interface (API) is extracted. Finally, the function call subgraphs with structural features are trained as the input of the deep graph convolutional network. Thus the detection and classification of malicious apps can be realized. Through experimentation on a dataset containing 11,120 Android apps, the method proposed in this paper can achieve detection accuracy of 98.2%, which is higher than other existing detection methods.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (23) ◽  
pp. 2948
Author(s):  
Corentin Rodrigo ◽  
Samuel Pierre ◽  
Ronald Beaubrun ◽  
Franjieh El Khoury

Android has become the leading operating system for mobile devices, and the most targeted one by malware. Therefore, many analysis methods have been proposed for detecting Android malware. However, few of them use proper datasets for evaluation. In this paper, we propose BrainShield, a hybrid malware detection model trained on the Omnidroid dataset to reduce attacks on Android devices. The latter is the most diversified dataset in terms of the number of different features, and contains the largest number of samples, 22,000 samples, for model evaluation in the Android malware detection field. BrainShield’s implementation is based on a client/server architecture and consists of three fully connected neural networks: (1) the first is used for static analysis and reaches an accuracy of 92.9% trained on 840 static features; (2) the second is a dynamic neural network that reaches an accuracy of 81.1% trained on 3722 dynamic features; and (3) the third neural network proposed is hybrid, reaching an accuracy of 91.1% trained on 7081 static and dynamic features. Simulation results show that BrainShield is able to improve the accuracy and the precision of well-known malware detection methods.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanping Xu ◽  
Chunhua Wu ◽  
Kangfeng Zheng ◽  
Xu Wang ◽  
Xinxin Niu ◽  
...  

Android malware detection is a complex and crucial issue. In this paper, we propose a malware detection model using a support vector machine (SVM) method based on feature weights that are computed by information gain (IG) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms. The IG weights are evaluated based on the relevance between features and class labels, and the PSO weights are adaptively calculated to result in the best fitness (the performance of the SVM classification model). Moreover, to overcome the defects of basic PSO, we propose a new adaptive inertia weight method called fitness-based and chaotic adaptive inertia weight-PSO (FCAIW-PSO) that improves on basic PSO and is based on the fitness and a chaotic term. The goal is to assign suitable weights to the features to ensure the best Android malware detection performance. The results of experiments indicate that the IG weights and PSO weights both improve the performance of SVM and that the performance of the PSO weights is better than that of the IG weights.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document