PMDS: Permission-Based Malware Detection System

The meteoric growth of the Android mobile platform has made it a main target of cyber-criminals. Mobile malware specifically targeting Android has surged and grown in tandem with the rising popularity of the platform [3, 5, 4, 6]. In response, the honus is on defenders to increase the difficulty of malware development to curb its rampant growth, and to devise effective detection mechanisms specifically targeting Android malware in order to better protect the end-users.

In this paper, we address the following question: do malicious applications on Android request predictably different permissions than legitimate applications? Based on analysis of 2950 samples of benign and malicious Android applications, we propose a novel Android malware detection technique called Permission-based Malware Detection Systems (PMDS). In PMDS, we view requested permissions as behavioral markers and build a machine learning classifier on those markers to automatically identify for unseen applications potentially harmful behavior based on the combination of permissions they require. By design, PMDS has the potential to detect previously unknown, and zero-day or next-generation malware. If attackers adapt and request for fewer permissions, PMDS will have impeded the simple strategies by which malware developers currently abuse their victims.

Experimental results show that PMDS detects more than 92–94% of previously unseen malware with a false positives rate of 1.52–3.93%.