Android malware analysis in a nutshell

Abstract

This paper offers a comprehensive analysis model for android malware. The model presents the essential factors affecting the analysis results of android malware that are vision-based. Current android malware analysis and solutions might consider one or some of these factors while building their malware predictive systems. However, this paper comprehensively highlights these factors and their impacts through a deep empirical study. The study comprises 22 CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) algorithms, 21 of them are well-known, and one proposed algorithm. Additionally, several types of files are considered before converting them to images, and two benchmark android malware datasets are utilized. Finally, comprehensive evaluation metrics are measured to assess the produced predictive models from the security and complexity perspectives. Consequently, guiding researchers and developers to plan and build efficient malware analysis systems that meet their requirements and resources. The results reveal that some factors might significantly impact the performance of the malware analysis solution. For example, from a security perspective, the accuracy, F1-score, precision, and recall are improved by 131.29%, 236.44%, 192%, and 131.29%, respectively, when changing one factor and fixing all other factors under study. Similar results are observed in the case of complexity assessment, including testing time, CPU usage, storage size, and pre-processing speed, proving the importance of the proposed android malware analysis model.