SpyDroid: A Framework for Employing Multiple Real-Time Malware Detectors on Android

Abstract

Android has become the leading operating system for next-generation smart devices. Consequently, the number of Android malware has also skyrocketed. Many dynamic analysis techniques have been proposed to detect Android malware. However, very few of these techniques use real-time monitoring on user devices as Android does not provide low-level information to third-party apps. Moreover, some techniques detect a specific malware class more effectively than others. Therefore, end users can be benefited by installing multiple malware detection techniques. In this paper, we propose SpyDroid, a real-time malware detection framework that can accommodate multiple detectors from third-parties (e.g., researchers and antivirus vendors) and allows efficient and controlled real-time monitoring. SpyDroid consists of two operating system modules (monitoring and detection) and supports application layer sub-detectors. Sub-detectors are regular Android applications that monitor and analyze different runtime information using the monitoring module and they report the detection module about their findings. The detection module decides when to mark an app as malware. Researchers and antivirus vendors can now publish their techniques via app markets and end users can install any number of sub-detectors as they require. We have implemented SpyDroid using the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and our experiments with a dataset containing 4,965 apps show that decisions from multiple sub-detectors can increase the malware detection rate significantly on a real device.