Malware Detection in Android Apps Using Static Analysis

Frequency of malware attacks because Android apps are increasing day by day. Current studies have revealed startling facts about data harvesting incidents, where user’s personal data is at stake. To preserve privacy of users, a permission induced risk interface MalApp to identify privacy violations rising from granting permissions during app installation is proposed. It comprises of multi-fold process that performs static analysis based on app’s category. First, concept of reverse engineering is applied to extract app permissions to construct a Boolean-valued permission matrix. Second, ranking of permissions is done to identify the risky permissions across category. Third, machine learning and ensembling techniques have been incorporated to test the efficacy of the proposed approach on a data set of 404 benign and 409 malicious apps. The empirical studies have identified that our proposed algorithm gives a best case malware detection rate of 98.33%. The highlight of interface is that any app can be classified as benign or malicious even before running it using static analysis.

Malware Detection in Android Apps Using Static Analysis

Frequency of malware attacks because Android apps are increasing day by day. Current studies have revealed startling facts about data harvesting incidents, where user’s personal data is at stake. To preserve privacy of users, a permission induced risk interface MalApp to identify privacy violations rising from granting permissions during app installation is proposed. It comprises of multi-fold process that performs static analysis based on app’s category. First, concept of reverse engineering is applied to extract app permissions to construct a Boolean-valued permission matrix. Second, ranking of permissions is done to identify the risky permissions across category. Third, machine learning and ensembling techniques have been incorporated to test the efficacy of the proposed approach on a data set of 404 benign and 409 malicious apps. The empirical studies have identified that our proposed algorithm gives a best case malware detection rate of 98.33%. The highlight of interface is that any app can be classified as benign or malicious even before running it using static analysis.

Android Apps Security Assessment using Sentiment Analysis Techniques: Comparative Study

Considering that application security is an important aspect, especially nowadays with the increase in technology and the number of fraudsters. It should be noted that determining the security of an application is a difficult task, especially since most fraudsters have become skilled and professional at manipulating people and stealing their sensitive data. Therefore, we pay attention to trying to spot insecurity apps, by analyzing user feedback on the Google Play platform and using sentiment analysis to determine the apps level of security. As it is known, user reviews reflect their experiments and experiences in addition to their feelings and satisfaction with the application or not. But unfortunately, not all of these reviews are real, and as is known, the fake reviews do not reflect the sincerity of feelings, so we have been keen in our work to filter the reviews to be the result is accurate and correct. This study is useful for both users wanting to install android apps and for developers interested in app optimization.

Influencing User’s Behavior Concerning Android Privacy Policy: An Overview

The wide-ranging implementation of Android applications used in various devices, from smartphones to intelligent television, has made it thought-provoking for developers. The permission granting mechanism is one of the defects imposed by the developers. Such assessing of defects does not allow the user to comprehend the implication of privacy for granting permission. Mobile applications are speedily easily reachable to typical users of mobile. Despite possible applications for improving the affordability, availability, and effectiveness of delivering various services, it handles sensitive data and information. Such data and information carry considerable security and privacy risks. Users are usually unaware of how the data can be managed and used. Reusable resources are available in the form of third-party libraries, which are broadly active in android apps. It provides a diversity of functions that deliver privacy and security concerns. Host applications and third-party libraries are run in the same process and share similar permissions. The current study has presented an overview of the existing approaches, methods, and tools used for influencing user behavior concerning android privacy policy. Various prominent libraries were searched, and their search results were analyzed briefly. The search results were presented in diverse perspectives for showing the details of the work done in the area. This will help researchers to offer new solutions in the area of the research.

‘All at the tap of a button’: Mapping the food app landscape

Mobile applications (commonly known as ‘apps’) are highly popular forms of software, with hundreds of billions of downloads globally each year. The ways in which the affordances of apps are portrayed on the app store platforms are crucial in sparking consumers’ initial interest. This article presents findings from the ‘Mapping the Food App Landscape’ study. The following two sources of online material were used in this study: (1) descriptions of food-related apps available in the Google Play store; and (2) the lists of the top-most installed free Android apps presented in the App Annie app analytics platform for Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The analytical approach is distinctive in bringing together the key feminist new materialism concepts of affective forces, relational connections and agential capacities with that of the promissory narrative. The study’s findings show that inapp publishers’ efforts to entice users, the Google Play app descriptions presented food apps as solutions to or escapes from the stresses and difficulties of everyday life. These app descriptions promised to generate excitement, fun and pleasure (games apps); configure and support convenient food supply and preparation arrangements (food ordering and delivery, meal planning and recipe apps); offer reassurance and better control over the body and encourage greater embodied self-awareness, health and wellbeing (food-tracking and nutrition apps); and contribute to creative and novel experiments in cooking (recipe apps). These findings map the landscape of food apps and the sociocultural contexts in which they are being created, published and adopted.

Fuzzy Integral-Based Multi-Classifiers Ensemble for Android Malware Classification

One of the most commonly used operating systems for smartphones is Android. The open-source nature of the Android operating system and the ability to include third-party Android apps from various markets has led to potential threats to user privacy. Malware developers use sophisticated methods that are intentionally designed to bypass the security checks currently used in smartphones. This makes effective detection of Android malware apps a difficult problem and important issue. This paper proposes a novel fuzzy integral-based multi-classifier ensemble to improve the accuracy of Android malware classification. The proposed approach utilizes the Choquet fuzzy integral as an aggregation function for the purpose of combining and integrating the classification results of several classifiers such as XGBoost, Random Forest, Decision Tree, AdaBoost, and LightGBM. Moreover, the proposed approach utilizes an adaptive fuzzy measure to consider the dynamic nature of the data in each classifier and the consistency and coalescence between each possible subset of classifiers. This enables the proposed approach to aggregate the classification results from the multiple classifiers. The experimental results using the dataset, consisting of 9476 Android goodware apps and 5560 malware Android apps, show that the proposed approach for Android malware classification based on the Choquet fuzzy integral technique outperforms the single classifiers and achieves the highest accuracy of 95.08%.

SAMLDroid: A Static Taint Analysis and Machine Learning Combined High-Accuracy Method for Identifying Android Apps with Location Privacy Leakage Risks

Insecure applications (apps) are increasingly used to steal users’ location information for illegal purposes, which has aroused great concern in recent years. Although the existing methods, i.e., static and dynamic taint analysis, have shown great merit for identifying such apps, which mainly rely on statically analyzing source code or dynamically monitoring the location data flow, identification accuracy is still under research, since the analysis results contain a certain false positive or true negative rate. In order to improve the accuracy and reduce the misjudging rate in the process of vetting suspicious apps, this paper proposes SAMLDroid, a combined method of static code analysis and machine learning for identifying Android apps with location privacy leakage, which can effectively improve the identification rate compared with existing methods. SAMLDroid first uses static analysis to scrutinize source code to investigate apps with location acquiring intentions. Then it exploits a well-trained classifier and integrates an app’s multiple features to dynamically analyze the pattern and deliver the final verdict about the app’s property. Finally, it is proved by conducting experiments, that the accuracy rate of SAMLDroid is up to 98.4%, which is nearly 20% higher than Apparecium.

Deep Learning Based Static Analysis of Malwares in Android Applications

Android is a widely distributed mobile operating system developed especially for mobile devices with touch screens. It is an open source, Google-distributed Linux-based mobile operating system. Since Android is open source, it enables Android devices to be targeted effectively by malware developers. Third-party markets do not search for malicious applications in their databases, so installing Android Application Packages (APKs) from these uncontrolled market places is often risky. Without user’s notice, these malware infected applications gain access to private user data, send text messages that costs the user, or hide malware apk file inside another application. The total number of new samples of Android malware amounted to 482,579 per month as of March 2020. In this paper deep learning approach that focuses on malware detection in android apps to protect data on user devices. We use different static features that are present in an Android application for the implementation of the proposed system. The system extracts various static features and gives them to the classifier for deep learning and shows the results. This proposed system will assist users in checking applications that are not downloaded from the official market.