Husam Kinawi

Rui Zhu, Chenglin Li, Di Niu et al.

With the growth of mobile devices and applications, the number of malicious software, or malware, is rapidly increasing in recent years, which calls for the development of advanced and effective malware detection approaches. Traditional methods such as signature-based ones cannot defend users from an increasing number of new types of malware or rapid malware behavior changes. In this paper, we propose a new Android malware detection approach based on deep learning and static analysis. Instead of using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) only, we further analyze the source code of Android applications and create their higher-level graphical semantics, which makes it harder for attackers to evade detection. In particular, we use a call graph from method invocations in an Android application to represent the application, and further analyze method attributes to form a structured Program Representation Graph (PRG) with node attributes. Then, we use a graph convolutional network (GCN) to yield a graph representation of the application by embedding the entire graph into a dense vector, and classify whether it is a malware or not. To efficiently train such a graph convolutional network, we propose a batch training scheme that allows multiple heterogeneous graphs to be input as a batch. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use graph representation learning for malware detection. We conduct extensive experiments from real-world sample collections and demonstrate that our developed system outperforms multiple other existing malware detection techniques.

Chenglin Li, Keith Mills, Rui Zhu et al.

As the popularity of Android smart phones has increased in recent years, so too has the number of malicious applications. Due to the potential for data theft mobile phone users face, the detection of malware on Android devices has become an increasingly important issue in cyber security. Traditional methods like signature-based routines are unable to protect users from the ever-increasing sophistication and rapid behavior changes in new types of Android malware. Therefore, a great deal of effort has been made recently to use machine learning models and methods to characterize and generalize the malicious behavior patterns of mobile apps for malware detection. In this paper, we propose a novel and highly reliable classifier for Android Malware detection based on a Factorization Machine architecture and the extraction of Android app features from manifest files and source code. Our results indicate that the numerical feature representation of an app typically results in a long and highly sparse vector and that the interactions among different features are critical to revealing malicious behavior patterns. After performing an extensive performance evaluation, our proposed method achieved a test result of 100.00% precision score on the DREBIN dataset and 99.22% precision score with only 1.10% false positive rate on the AMD dataset. These metrics match the performance of state-of-the-art machine-learning-based Android malware detection methods and several commercial antivirus engines with the benefit of training up to 50 times faster.