An Android Malware Detection Leveraging Machine Learning

Abstract

Android applications have recently witnessed a pronounced progress, making them among the fastest growing technological fields to thrive and advance. However, such level of growth does not evolve without some cost. This particularly involves increased security threats that the underlying applications and their users usually fall prey to. As malware becomes increasingly more capable of penetrating these applications and exploiting them in suspicious actions, the need for active research endeavors to counter these malicious programs becomes imminent. Some of the studies are based on dynamic analysis, and others are based on static analysis, while some are completely dependent on both. In this paper, we studied static, dynamic, and hybrid analyses to identify malicious applications. We leverage machine learning classifiers to detect malware activities as we explain the effectiveness of these classifiers in the classification process. Our results prove the efficiency of permissions and the action repetition feature set and their influential roles in detecting malware in Android applications. Our results show empirically very close accuracy results when using static, dynamic, and hybrid analyses. Thus, we use static analyses due to their lower cost compared to dynamic and hybrid analyses. In other words, we found the best results in terms of accuracy and cost (the trade-off) make us select static analysis over other techniques.