Using Weighted Bipartite Graph for Android Malware Classification

Abstract

The complexity and the number of mobile malware are increasing continually as the usage of smartphones continue to rise. The popularity of Android has increased the number of malware that target Android-based smartphones. Developing efficient and effective approaches for Android malware classification is emerging as a new challenge. This paper introduces an effective Android malware classifier based on the weighted bipartite graph. This classifier includes two phases: in the first phase, the permissions and API Calls used in the Android app are utilized to construct the weighted bipartite graph; the feature importance scores are integrated as weights in the bipartite graph to improve the discrimination between malware and goodware apps, by incorporating extra meaningful information into the graph structure. The second phase applied multiple classifiers to categorise the Android application as a malware or goodware. The results using an Android malware dataset consists of different malware families, showing the effectiveness of our approach toward Android malware classification.