Malware detection techniques and tools for Android

Abstract

Smartphone, with its powerful capabilities, has been wildly used in every area of our day-to-day life. The enormous kinds of applications installed in these smartphones like WhatsApp and Viber have changed the way people live and communicate. An estimate by Gartner indicates that 90% of the phones by the end of 2018 will be smartphones (MobileStorm, 2014). The most popular mobile operating system today in the industry is Android. However, with the prevalence of Android smartphone, malware authors have started to target it. Although mobile anti-malware solutions could be installed to scan malicious apps before they are made available for download, existing mobile anti-malware software relies exclusively upon a prior knowledge of malware samples in order to extract and deploy signatures for subsequent detection. Moreover, malware writers may update existing malware samples to dodge detection. Hence, this imprudent nature makes them inadequate in identifying new or mutated malware. This paper explores different techniques and tools available to analyse and detect Android malware. It also highlights the features and limitations of these techniques and tools.