Low-Resource Footprint, Data-Driven Malware Detection on Android

Resource-constrained systems are becoming more and more common as users migrate from PCs to mobile devices and as IoT systems enter the mainstream. At the same time, it is not acceptable to reduce the level of security hence it is necessary to accommodate the required security into the system-imposed resource constraints. This paper introduces BAdDroIds, a mobile application leveraging machine learning for detecting malware on resource constrained devices. BAdDroIds executes in background and transparently analyzes the applications as soon as they are installed, i.e., before infecting the device. BAdDroIds relies on static analysis techniques and features provided by the Android OS to build up sound and complete models of Android apps in terms of permissions and API invocations. It uses ad-hoc supervised classification techniques to allow resource-efficient malware detection. By exploiting the intrinsic nature of data, it has been possible to implement a state-of-the-art data-driven model which provides deep insights on the detection problem and can be efficiently executed on the device itself as it requires a very limited computational effort. Besides its limited resource footprint, BAdDroIds is extremely effective: an extensive experimental evaluation shows that BAdDroIds outperforms the currently available solutions in terms of accuracy, which is around 99%.