Detection, Classification and Characterization of Android Malware Using API Data Dependency

With the popularity of Android devices, more and more Android malware are manufactured every year. How to filter out malicious app is a serious problem for app markets. In this paper, we propose DroidADDMiner, an efficient and precise system to detect, classify and characterize Android malware. DroidADDMiner is a machine learning based system that extracts features based on data dependency between sensitive APIs. It extracts API data dependence paths embedded in app to construct feature vectors for machine learning. While DroidSIFT [13] also attempts automated detection of Android applications according to data flow analysis, DroidADDMiner can not only reduce the run time but also characterize malware’s behaviors automatically. We implement DroidADDMiner based on FlowDroid [14] and evaluate it using 5648 malware samples and 14280 benign apps. Experiments show that, for malware detection, DroidADDMiner achieves a 98% detection rate, with a 0.3% false positive rate. For malware classification, the accuracy of classifying malicious apps under their proper family labels is 96%. Although performing data flow analysis, most of the experimental samples can be examined in 60 seconds.