Android Malware Detection Against String Encryption Based Obfuscation

Abstract

Android operating system is one of the most prominent operating systems among the mobile device users worldwide. But it is often the most targeted platform for malicious activities. Many researchers have studied android malware detection systems over the previous years. But android malware detection systems face many challenges, and obfuscation is one of them. String encryption is one such obfuscation technique which helps android malwares to evade malware detection systems. To address this challenge in android malware detection systems, a novel approach is being proposed in this study where crypto-detector: An open-source cryptography detection tool has been used in decompiled application code to extract encrypted strings and encryption methods as features. Accuracy of 0.9880 and F1-score of 0.9843 have been achieved during performance evaluation. Importance of newly proposed crypto features has been discussed. Performance of our framework has been compared to those of other similar existing works, and our work has outperformed all of them.