Babu Rajesh V, Phaninder Reddy, Himanshu P and Mahesh U Patil, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, India

Android being a widely used mobile platform has witnessed an increase in the number of malicious samples on its market place. The availability of multiple sources for downloading applications has also contributed to users falling prey to malicious applications. Classification of an Android application as malicious or benign remains a challenge as malicious applications maneuver to pose themselves as benign. This paper presents an approach which extracts various features from Android Application Package file (APK) using static analysis and subsequently classifies using machine learning techniques. The contribution of this work includes deriving, extracting and analyzing crucial features of Android applications that aid in efficient classification. The analysis is carried out using various machine learning algorithms with both weighted and non-weighted approaches. It was observed that weighted approach depicts higher detection rates using fewer features. Random Forest algorithm exhibited high detection rate and shows the least false positive rate.

Mobile Security, Malware, Static Analysis, Machine Learning, Android