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“Andromaly”: a behavioral malware detection framework for android devices

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Abstract

This article presents Andromaly—a framework for detecting malware on Android mobile devices. The proposed framework realizes a Host-based Malware Detection System that continuously monitors various features and events obtained from the mobile device and then applies Machine Learning anomaly detectors to classify the collected data as normal (benign) or abnormal (malicious). Since no malicious applications are yet available for Android, we developed four malicious applications, and evaluated Andromaly’s ability to detect new malware based on samples of known malware. We evaluated several combinations of anomaly detection algorithms, feature selection method and the number of top features in order to find the combination that yields the best performance in detecting new malware on Android. Empirical results suggest that the proposed framework is effective in detecting malware on mobile devices in general and on Android in particular.

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Notes

  1. http://www.android.com

  2. Also known as Detection Rate in the intrusion detection community.

  3. Also known as False Alarm Rate in the intrusion detection community.

  4. Android uses a proprietary format for Java bytecode called.dex (Dalvik Executable), designed to be more compact and memory-efficient than regular Java class files.

  5. http://www.usenix.org/events/sec09/tech/tech.html#cannings

  6. http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/google-says-that-memoryup-has-no-malware-20090128/

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Correspondence to Asaf Shabtai.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 7 List of used applications
Table 8 List of collected features

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Shabtai, A., Kanonov, U., Elovici, Y. et al. “Andromaly”: a behavioral malware detection framework for android devices. J Intell Inf Syst 38, 161–190 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-010-0148-x

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