A Hybrid Modeling of Mobile App Dynamics on Serial Causality for Malware Detection

Abstract

The popularity of smart phones has brought significant convenience to people's lives, but also there are many security problems. In recent years, malicious applications are increasingly rampant, which threaten users and society as security challenges to network reliability and management. However, due to neglecting the sequential features between network flows, existing malicious application recognition methods based on network traffic analysis have low recognition accuracy. Based on the network traffic characteristics of Android applications, this paper firstly applies Long Short-Term Memory network-based variational Auto-Encoder to extract the sequential feature of the application running time. Then, we design the BP neural network for initial classification and connect the class vector output of the BP neural network with the original data. The output is fed into the cascade forest for further feature learning and classification. The integrated methods are easy to implement with data independency and efficiency. We conduct experiments to evaluate the proposed with Android malware dataset CICAndMal2017, with a 97.29% high accuracy, comparatively significant precision and recall rates when benchmarked against other methods.