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Effective and Efficient Hybrid Android Malware Classification Using Pseudo-Label Stacked Auto-Encoder

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Abstract

Android has become the target of attackers because of its popularity. The detection of Android mobile malware has become increasingly important due to its significant threat. Supervised machine learning, which has been used to detect Android malware is far from perfect because it requires a significant amount of labeled data. Since labeled data is expensive and difficult to get while unlabeled data is abundant and cheap in this context, we resort to a semi-supervised learning technique, namely pseudo-label stacked auto-encoder (PLSAE), which involves training using a set of labeled and unlabeled instances. We use a hybrid approach of dynamic analysis and static analysis to craft feature vectors. We evaluate our proposed model on CICMalDroid2020, which includes 17,341 most recent samples of five different Android apps categories. After that, we compare the results with state-of-the-art techniques in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Experimental results show that our proposed framework outperforms other semi-supervised approaches and common machine learning algorithms.

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Notes

  1. https://www.unb.ca/cic/datasets/maldroid-2020.html

  2. https://www.unb.ca/cic/datasets/maldroid-2020.html

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude toward Dr. Lorenzo Cavallaro and Feargus Pendlebury (Systems Security Research Lab, King’s College London) for generously analyzing a large number of Android APKs in CopperDroid.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity (CIC), Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada

    Samaneh Mahdavifar & Ali. A. Ghorbani

  2. School of Computer Science, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada

    Dima Alhadidi

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  1. Samaneh Mahdavifar
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Correspondence to Samaneh Mahdavifar.

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Mahdavifar, S., Alhadidi, D. & Ghorbani, A.A. Effective and Efficient Hybrid Android Malware Classification Using Pseudo-Label Stacked Auto-Encoder. J Netw Syst Manage 30, 22 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-021-09634-4

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