Profiling user-trigger dependence for Android malware detection

Abstract

As mobile computing becomes an integral part of the modern user experience, malicious applications have infiltrated open marketplaces for mobile platforms. Malware apps stealthily launch operations to retrieve sensitive user or device data or abuse system resources. We describe a highly accurate classification approach for detecting malicious Android apps. Our method statically extracts a data-flow feature on how user inputs trigger sensitive API invocations, a property referred to as the user-trigger dependence. Our evaluation with 1433 malware apps and 2684 free popular apps gives a classification accuracy (2.1% false negative rate and 2.0% false positive rate) that is better than, or at least competitive against, the state-of-the-art. Our method also discovers new malicious apps in the Google Play market that cannot be detected by virus scanning tools. Our thesis in this mobile app classification work is to advocate the approach of benign property enforcement, i.e., extracting unique behavioral properties from benign programs and designing corresponding classification policies.