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The Android operating system has gained popularity and evolved rapidly since the previous decade. Traditional approaches such as static and dynamic malware identification techniques require a lot of human intervention and resources to design the malware classification model. The real challenge lies with the fact that inspecting all files of the application structure leads to high processing time, more storage, and manual effort. To solve these problems, optimization algorithms and deep learning has been recently tested for mitigating malware attacks. This manuscript proposes Summing of neurAl aRchitecture and VisualizatiOn Technology for Android Malware identification (SARVOTAM). The system converts the malware non-intuitive features into fingerprint images to extract the quality information. A fine-tuned Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used to automatically extract rich features from visualized malware thus eliminating the feature engineering and domain expert cost. The experiments were done using the DREBIN dataset. A total of fifteen different combinations of the Android malware image sections were used to identify and classify Android malware. The softmax layer of CNN was substituted with machine learning algorithms like K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Random Forest (RF) to analyze the grayscale malware images. It observed that CNN-SVM model outperformed original CNN as well as CNN-KNN, and CNN-RF. The classification results showed that our method is able to achieve an accuracy of 92.59% using Android certificates and manifest malware images. This paper reveals the lightweight solution and much precise option for malware identification.

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Ransomware is a special malware designed to extort money in return for unlocking the device and personal data files. Smartphone users store their personal as well as official data on these devices. Ransomware attackers found it bewitching for their financial benefits. The financial losses due to ransomware attacks are increasing rapidly. Recent studies witness that out of 87% reported cyber-attacks, 41% are due to ransomware attacks. The inability of application-signature-based solutions to detect unknown malware has inspired many researchers to build automated classification models using machine learning algorithms. Advanced malware is capable of delaying malicious actions on sensing the emulated environment and hence posing a challenge to dynamic monitoring of applications also. Existing hybrid approaches utilize a variety of features combination for detection and analysis. The rapidly changing nature and distribution strategies are possible reasons behind the deteriorated performance of primitive ransomware detection techniques. The limitations of existing studies include ambiguity in selecting the features set. Increasing the feature set may lead to freedom of adept attackers against learning algorithms. In this work, we intend to propose a hybrid approach to identify and mitigate Android ransomware. This study employs a novel dominant feature selection algorithm to extract the dominant feature set. The experimental results show that our proposed model can differentiate between clean and ransomware with improved precision. Our proposed hybrid solution confirms an accuracy of 99.85% with zero false positives while considering 60 prominent features. Further, it also justifies the feature selection algorithm used. The comparison of the proposed method with the existing frameworks indicates its better performance.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a recent emerging area in computational science. There are several unexplored issues in the quality assessment of OSM. Firstly, researchers are using various established assessment methods by comparing OSM with authoritative dataset. However, these methods are unsuitable to assess OSM data quality in the case of the non-availability of authoritative data. In such a scenario, the intrinsic quality indicators can be used to assess the quality. Secondly, a framework for data assessment specific to different geographic information system (GIS) domains is not available. In this light, the current study presents an extension of the Quantum GIS (QGIS) processing toolbox by using existing functionalities and writing new scripts to handle spatial data. This would enable researchers to assess the completeness of spatial data using intrinsic indicators. The study also proposed a heuristic approach to test the road navigability of OSM data. The developed models are applied on Punjab (India) OSM data. The results suggest that the OSM project in Punjab (India) is progressing at a slow peace, and contributors' motivation is required to enhance the fitness of data. It is concluded that the scripts developed to provide an intuitive method to assess the OSM data based on quality indicators can be easily utilized for evaluating the fitness-of-use of the data of any region.