A Lightweight Multi-Source Fast Android Malware Detection Model

Abstract

Most of the current malware detection methods running on Android are based on signature and cloud technologies leading to poor protection against new types of malware. Deep learning techniques take Android malware detection to a new level. Still, most deep learning-based Android malware detection methods are too inefficient or even unworkable on Android devices due to their high resource consumption. Therefore, this paper proposes MSFDroid, a lightweight multi-source fast Android malware detection model, which uses information from the internal files of the Android application package in several dimensions to build base models for ensemble learning. Meanwhile, this paper proposes an adaptive soft voting method by dynamically adjusting the weights of each base model to overcome the noise generated by traditional soft voting and thus improves the performance. It also proposes adaptive shrinkage convolutional unit that can dynamically adjust the convolutional kernel’s weight and the activation function’s threshold to improve the expressiveness of the CNN. The proposed method is tested on public datasets and on several real devices. The experimental results show that it achieves a better trade-off between performance and efficiency by significantly improving the detection speed while achieving a comparable performance compared to other deep learning methods.