An Adversarial Machine Learning Model Against Android Malware Evasion Attacks

Abstract

With explosive growth of Android malware and due to its damage to smart phone users, the detection of Android malware is one of the cybersecurity topics that are of great interests. To protect legitimate users from the evolving Android malware attacks, systems using machine learning techniques have been successfully deployed and offer unparalleled flexibility in automatic Android malware detection. Unfortunately, as machine learning based classifiers become more widely deployed, the incentive for defeating them increases. In this paper, we explore the security of machine learning in Android malware detection on the basis of a learning-based classifier with the input of Application Programming Interface (API) calls extracted from the smali files. In particular, we consider different levels of the attackers’ capability and present a set of corresponding evasion attacks to thoroughly assess the security of the classifier. To effectively counter these evasion attacks, we then propose a robust secure-learning paradigm and show that it can improve system security against a wide class of evasion attacks. The proposed model can also be readily applied to other security tasks, such as anti-spam and fraud detection.