FB2Droid: A Novel Malware Family-Based Bagging Algorithm for Android Malware Detection

Abstract

As the number of Android malware applications continues to grow at a high rate, detecting malware to protect the system security and user privacy is becoming increasingly urgent. Each malware application belongs to a specific family, and there is a gap in the number of malware families. The accuracy of detection can be improved if malware family information is well utilized and certain strategies are adopted to balance the variability among samples. In addition, the performance of a base classifier is limited. If an ensemble classifier or an ensemble method can be adopted, the detection effect can be further improved. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel malware family-based bagging algorithm for Android malware detection, called FB2Droid, to perform malware detection. First, five features are extracted from the Android application package. Then, the relief feature selection algorithm is used for feature selection. Next, we designed two different sampling strategies based on different families of malware to alleviate the sample imbalance in the dataset. Combined with the two sampling strategies, the traditional bagging algorithm is improved to integrate the classifier. In the experiment, several classifiers were used to evaluate the proposed scheme. The experimental results show that the proposed sampling strategy and the improved bagging algorithm can effectively improve the detection accuracy of these classifiers.