BFEDroid: A Feature Selection Technique to Detect Malware in Android Apps Using Machine Learning

Abstract

Malware detection refers to the process of detecting the presence of malware on a host system, or that of determining whether a specific program is malicious or benign. Machine learning-based solutions first gather information from applications and then use machine learning algorithms to develop a classifier that can distinguish between malicious and benign applications. Researchers and practitioners have long paid close attention to the issue. Most previous work has addressed the differences in feature importance or the computation of feature weights, which is unrelated to the classification model used, and therefore, the implementation of a selection approach with limited feature hiccups, and increases the execution time and memory usage. BFEDroid is a machine learning detection strategy that combines backward, forward, and exhaustive subset selection. This proposed malware detection technique can be updated by retraining new applications with true labels. It has higher accuracy (99%), lower memory consumption (1680), and a shorter execution time (1.264SI) than current malware detection methods that use feature selection.