The Android malware detection systems between hope and reality

Abstract

The widespread use of Android-based smartphones made it an important target for malicious applications’ developers. So, a large number of frameworks have been proposed to tackle the huge number of daily published malwares. Despite there are many review papers that have been conducted in order to shed light on the works that achieved in Android malware analysing domain, the number of conducted review papers do not fit with the importance of this research field and with the volume of achieved works. Also, there is no comprehensive taxonomy for all research trends in the field of analysing malicious applications targeting the Android system. Furthermore, none of the existing review papers contains a schematic model that makes it easy for the reader to know the methods and methodologies used in a particular field of research without much effort. This paper aims at proposing a comprehensive taxonomy and suggesting a new schematic review approach. To this end, a review of a large number of works that achieved between 2009 and 2019 has been conducted. The achieved study includes more than 200 papers that have different goals such as apps’ behaviour analysis, automatic user interface triggers or packer/unpacker frameworks development. Also, a comprehensive taxonomy has been proposed so that most of the previous works can be classified under it. To the best of our knowledge, the suggested taxonomy is the widest and the most comprehensive in terms of the covered research trends. Moreover, we have proposed a detailed schematic model (called Schematic Review Model) illustrates the process of detecting the malignant applications of an Android in the light of the studied works and the proposed taxonomy. To our knowledge, this is the first time that the Android malware detection methods have been explained in this way with this amount of detail. Furthermore, the studied researches have been analysed according to multiple criteria such as used analysing method, used features, used detection method, and used dataset. Also, the features used in the studied works were discussed in detail by dividing it into multiple classes. Moreover, the challenges facing Android’s malware analysing methods were discussed in detail. Finally, it has been concluded that there are gaps between the size and the goal of the conducted works and the number of malicious apps published every day, so some future works areas have been proposed and discussed.