apk2vec: Semi-supervised multi-view representation learning for profiling Android applications
This work addresses the need for better app profiling to enhance downstream analytics such as malware analysis and app recommendation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing representation learning methods with multi-view integration.
The paper tackles the problem of profiling Android applications by developing apk2vec, a semi-supervised multi-view representation learning framework that generates compact app embeddings, and it demonstrates significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art techniques in tasks like malware detection and app recommendation across evaluations with over 42,000 apps.
Building behavior profiles of Android applications (apps) with holistic, rich and multi-view information (e.g., incorporating several semantic views of an app such as API sequences, system calls, etc.) would help catering downstream analytics tasks such as app categorization, recommendation and malware analysis significantly better. Towards this goal, we design a semi-supervised Representation Learning (RL) framework named apk2vec to automatically generate a compact representation (aka profile/embedding) for a given app. More specifically, apk2vec has the three following unique characteristics which make it an excellent choice for largescale app profiling: (1) it encompasses information from multiple semantic views such as API sequences, permissions, etc., (2) being a semi-supervised embedding technique, it can make use of labels associated with apps (e.g., malware family or app category labels) to build high quality app profiles, and (3) it combines RL and feature hashing which allows it to efficiently build profiles of apps that stream over time (i.e., online learning). The resulting semi-supervised multi-view hash embeddings of apps could then be used for a wide variety of downstream tasks such as the ones mentioned above. Our extensive evaluations with more than 42,000 apps demonstrate that apk2vec's app profiles could significantly outperform state-of-the-art techniques in four app analytics tasks namely, malware detection, familial clustering, app clone detection and app recommendation.