Abstract-It is well-known that malware constantly evolves so as to evade detection and this causes the entire malware population to be non-stationary. Contrary to this fact, prior works on machine learning based Android malware detection have assumed that the distribution of the observed malware characteristics (i.e., features) do not change over time. In this work, we address the problem of malware population drift and propose a novel online machine learning based framework, named DroidOL to handle it and effectively detect malware. In order to perform accurate detection, the security-sensitive behaviors are captured from apps in the form of inter-procedural control-flow sub-graph features using a state-of-the-art graph kernel. In order to perform scalable detection and to adapt to the drift and evolution in malware population, an online passiveaggressive classifier is used.In a large-scale comparative analysis with more than 87,000 apps, DroidOL achieves 84.29% accuracy outperforming two state-of-the-art malware techniques by more than 20% in their typical batch learning setting and more than 3% when they are continuously re-trained. Our experimental findings strongly indicate that online learning based approaches are highly suitable for real-world malware detection.
It is well-known that Android malware constantly evolves so as to evade detection. This causes the entire malware population to be non-stationary. Contrary to this fact, most of the prior works on Machine Learning based Android malware detection have assumed that the distribution of the observed malware characteristics (i.e., features) does not change over time.In this work, we address the problem of malware population drift and propose a novel online learning based framework to detect malware, named CASANDRA (Context-aware, Adaptive and Scalable ANDRoid mAlware detector). In order to perform accurate detection, a novel graph kernel that facilitates capturing apps' security-sensitive behaviors along with their context information from dependency graphs is proposed. Besides being accurate and scalable, CASANDRA has specific advantages: (i) being adaptive to the evolution in malware features over time (ii) explaining the significant features that led to an app's classification as being malicious or benign. In a large-scale comparative analysis, CASANDRA outperforms two state-of-the-art techniques on a benchmark dataset achieving 99.23% F-measure. When evaluated with more than 87,000 apps collected in-the-wild, CASANDRA achieves 89.92% accuracy, outperforming existing techniques by more than 25% in their typical batch learning setting and more than 7% when they are continuously retained, while maintaining comparable efficiency.
In this paper, we propose a novel graph kernel specifically to address a challenging problem in the field of cyber-security, namely, malware detection. Previous research has revealed the following: (1) Graph representations of programs are ideally suited for malware detection as they are robust against several attacks, (2) Besides capturing topological neighbourhoods (i.e., structural information) from these graphs it is important to capture the context under which the neighbourhoods are reachable to accurately detect malicious neighbourhoods.We observe that state-of-the-art graph kernels, such as Weisfeiler-Lehman kernel (WLK) capture the structural information well but fail to capture contextual information. To address this, we develop the Contextual Weisfeiler-Lehman kernel (CWLK) which is capable of capturing both these types of information. We show that for the malware detection problem, CWLK is more expressive and hence more accurate than WLK while maintaining comparable efficiency. Through our largescale experiments with more than 50,000 real-world Android apps, we demonstrate that CWLK outperforms two state-ofthe-art graph kernels (including WLK) and three malware detection techniques by more than 5.27% and 4.87% F-measure, respectively, while maintaining high efficiency. This high accuracy and efficiency make CWLK suitable for large-scale real-world malware detection.
Existing Android malware detection approaches use a variety of features such as securitysensitive APIs, system calls, control-flow structures and information flows in conjunction with Machine Learning classifiers to achieve accurate detection. Each of these feature sets provides a unique semantic perspective (or view ) of apps' behaviors with inherent strengths and limitations. Meaning, some views are more amenable to detect certain attacks but may not be suitable to characterize several other attacks. Most of the existing malware detection approaches use only one (or a selected few) of the aforementioned feature sets which prevents them from detecting a vast majority of attacks. Addressing this limitation, we propose MKLDroid, a unified framework that systematically integrates multiple views of apps for performing comprehensive malware detection and malicious code localization. The rationale is that, while a malware app can disguise itself in some views, disguising in every view while maintaining malicious intent will be much harder.MKLDroid uses a graph kernel to capture structural and contextual information from apps' dependency graphs and identify malice code patterns in each view. Subsequently, it employs Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) to find a weighted combination of the views which yields the best detection accuracy. Besides multi-view learning, MKLDroid's unique and salient trait is its ability to locate fine-grained malice code portions in dependency graphs (e.g., methods/classes). Malicious code localization caters several important applications such as supporting human analysts studying malware behaviors, engineering malware signatures, and other counter-measures. Through our large-scale experiments on several datasets (incl. wild apps), we demonstrate that MKLDroid outperforms three state-of-the-art techniques consistently, in terms of accuracy while maintaining comparable efficiency. In our malicious code localization experiments on a dataset of repackaged malware, MKLDroid was able to identify all the malice classes with 94% average recall. Our work opens up two new avenues in malware research: (i) enables the research community to elegantly look at Android malware behaviors in multiple perspectives simultaneously, and (ii) performing precise and scalable malicious code localization.
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