Research Trends in Malware Detection on Android Devices

Abstract

Mobile phones have become the necessity of modern human life to store our valuable information such as passwords, reminders, messages, photos, videos and social contacts. The advent in mobile technology has made human life easier and more efficient. However, at the same time, our excessive dependency on mobile devices has drawn attention of malware authors and cyber criminals leading to large number of cyber-attacks. Amongst all, the major concern of security threat is on Android smartphones. The key reason for it is that it does not restrict users to download applications from unsafe sites. So, it is important to develop robust and efficient Android Malware detection system in order to protect our sensitive data from cyber-attacks on Android platform. In this work, we discuss different types of Android Malwares and provide critical review on their detection approaches that exist in literature. We also highlight promising new directions of research in the domain of Malware detection on Android devices.