HinDroid: An Intelligent Android Malware Detection System

HinDroid: An Intelligent Android Malware Detection System Based on Structured Heterogeneous Information Network Yanfang Ye (West Virginia University) Shifu Hou (West Virginia University) Yangqiu Song (West Virginia University) With explosive growth of Android malware and due to the severity of its damages to smart phone users, the detection of Android malware has become an increasingly important topic in cyber security. The increasing sophistication of Android malware calls for new defensive techniques that are harder to evade, and are capable of protecting users against novel threats. In this paper, to detect Android malware, instead of using Application Programming Interface (API) calls only, we further analyze the different relationships between them and create higher-level semantics which require more efforts for attackers to evade the detection. We represent the Android applications (apps), related APIs, and their rich relationships as a structured heterogeneous information network (HIN). Then we use a meta-path based approach to characterize the semantic relatedness of apps and APIs. We use each meta-path to formulate a similarity measure over Android apps, and aggregate different similarities using multi-kernel learning. Then each meta-path is automatically weighted by the learning algorithm to make predictions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the rest work to use structured HIN for Android malware detection. Comprehensive experiments on real sample collections from Comodo Cloud Security Center are conducted to compare various malware detection approaches. Promising experimental results demonstrate that our developed system HinDroid system outperforms other alternative Android malware detection techniques. HinDroid has already been incorporated into the scanning tool of Comodo Mobile Security product. More on http://www.kdd.org/kdd2017/

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