Mass Discovery of Android Malware Behavioral Characteristics for Detection Consideration

Abstract

Android malware have surged and been sophisticated, posing a great threat to users. The key challenge of detect Android malware is how to discovery their behavioral characteristics at a large scale, and use them to detect Android malware. In this work, we are motivated to discover the discriminatory features extracted from Android APK files for Android malware detection. To achieve this goal, firstly we extract a very large number of static features from each Android application (or app). Secondly, we explain the importance of each kind of feature in Android malware detection. Thirdly, we fed these features into three different classifiers (e.g., SVM, DT, RandomFoerst) for the detection of Android malware. We conduct extensive experiments on large real-world app sets consisting of 6,820 Android malware and 37,581 Android benign apps. The experimental results and our analysis give insights regarding what discriminatory features are most effective to characterize Android malware for building an effective and efficient Android malware detection approach.