A lightweight deep learning-based android malware detection framework

Abstract

Android, as the most prevalent mobile operating system (OS) in recent years, has been widely applied in various cell phones, tablets, and embedded devices, greatly facilitating people’s lives. However, Android malware is also emerging, which significantly endangers people’s information security. The current Android malware detection systems are often suffering from cumbersome structures and massive computational resources, which seriously limits their direct deployment on mobile devices. We design a lightweight Android malware detection system named MCADS, which consists of a two-layer structure. At the first layer, we use an augmented Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) for the preliminary analysis of malware. At the second layer, we propose a new lightweight variant of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to further analyze the Apps that cannot be accurately identified in the first layer. Finally, a careful experimental investigation has been conducted. The proposed method achieves an accuracy of 98.12%, surpassing that of the compared methods. The promising results demonstrate the potential of MCADS as a practical adjunctive solution for detecting malware, complementing existing complex detection methods.