A Systematic Evaluation of Android Anti-Malware Tools for Detection of Contemporary Malware

Abstract

Android has become ubiquitous by taking more than 86 % of the market share. This rapid expansion has brought a slew of new threats, including privacy breaches, data thefts, and cyberespionage. As today's malware are highly sophisticated and capable to evade even state-of-the-art malware detection tools using obfuscation and repacking techniques. However, existing surveys possess challenges for researchers as they classify tools based on analysis methodology such as static and dynamic analysis. They do not cover accuracy rate, false-positive rate, effectiveness, performance evaluation, and additional features such as secure backup and spam blocking. Therefore, to check the strength of existing anti-malware tools, we present an in-depth study of Android anti-malware tools built over the last decade. This research classifies anti-malware tools, according to their analysis methodology along with their protection capabilities, performance, accuracy rate, usability, and ability to classify malware families. Based on our thorough studies, shortcomings are discussed and research gaps have been identified.