Learning-Based Detection for Malicious Android Application Using Code Vectorization

Abstract

The malicious APK (Android Application Package) makers use some techniques such as code obfuscation and code encryption to avoid existing detection methods, which poses new challenges for accurate virus detection and makes it more and more difficult to detect the malicious code. A report indicates that a new malicious app for Android is created every 10 seconds. To combat this serious malware activity, a scalable malware detection approach is needed, which can effectively and efficiently identify the malware apps. Common static detection methods often rely on Hash matching and analysis of viruses, which cannot quickly detect new malicious Android applications and their variants. In this paper, a malicious Android application detection method is proposed, which is implemented by the deep network fusion model. The hybrid model only needs to use the sample training model to achieve high accuracy in the identification of the malicious applications, which is more suitable for the detection of the new malicious Android applications than the existing methods. This method extracts the static features in the core code of the Android application by decompiling APK files, then performs code vectorization processing, and uses the deep learning network for classification and discrimination. Our experiments with a data set containing 10,170 apps show that the decisions from the hybrid model can increase the malware detection rate significantly on a real device, which verifies the superiority of this method in the detection of malicious codes.