An Android Malware Detection Approach Using Community Structures of Weighted Function Call Graphs

With the development of code obfuscation and application repackaging technologies, an increasing number of structural information-based methods have been proposed for malware detection. Although, many offer improved detection accuracy via a similarity comparison of specific graphs, they still face l...

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Main Authors: Yao Du, Junfeng Wang, Qi Li
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2017-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7964684/
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author Yao Du
Junfeng Wang
Qi Li
author_facet Yao Du
Junfeng Wang
Qi Li
author_sort Yao Du
collection DOAJ
description With the development of code obfuscation and application repackaging technologies, an increasing number of structural information-based methods have been proposed for malware detection. Although, many offer improved detection accuracy via a similarity comparison of specific graphs, they still face limitations in terms of computation time and the need for manual operation. In this paper, we present a new malware detection method that automatically divides a function call graph into community structures. The features of these community structures can then be used to detect malware. Our method reduces the computation time by improving the Girvan-Newman algorithm and using machine learning classification instead of a similarity comparison of subgraphs. To evaluate our method, 5040 malware samples and 8750 benign samples were collected as an experimental data set. The evaluation results show that the detection accuracy of our method is higher than that of three well-known anti-virus software and two previous control flow graph-based methods for many malware families. The runtime performance of our method exhibits a clear improvement over the GN algorithm for community structure generation.
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spelling doaj.art-cdfc3b2c2dae46cbad1ff39f2c7350452022-12-21T22:22:59ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362017-01-015174781748610.1109/ACCESS.2017.27201607964684An Android Malware Detection Approach Using Community Structures of Weighted Function Call GraphsYao Du0https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2914-2283Junfeng Wang1https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1699-2270Qi Li2College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu, ChinaSchool of Aeronautics and Astronautics and College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu, ChinaCollege of Cyberspace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, ChinaWith the development of code obfuscation and application repackaging technologies, an increasing number of structural information-based methods have been proposed for malware detection. Although, many offer improved detection accuracy via a similarity comparison of specific graphs, they still face limitations in terms of computation time and the need for manual operation. In this paper, we present a new malware detection method that automatically divides a function call graph into community structures. The features of these community structures can then be used to detect malware. Our method reduces the computation time by improving the Girvan-Newman algorithm and using machine learning classification instead of a similarity comparison of subgraphs. To evaluate our method, 5040 malware samples and 8750 benign samples were collected as an experimental data set. The evaluation results show that the detection accuracy of our method is higher than that of three well-known anti-virus software and two previous control flow graph-based methods for many malware families. The runtime performance of our method exhibits a clear improvement over the GN algorithm for community structure generation.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7964684/Malwarecommunity structuresmachine learning
spellingShingle Yao Du
Junfeng Wang
Qi Li
An Android Malware Detection Approach Using Community Structures of Weighted Function Call Graphs
IEEE Access
Malware
community structures
machine learning
title An Android Malware Detection Approach Using Community Structures of Weighted Function Call Graphs
title_full An Android Malware Detection Approach Using Community Structures of Weighted Function Call Graphs
title_fullStr An Android Malware Detection Approach Using Community Structures of Weighted Function Call Graphs
title_full_unstemmed An Android Malware Detection Approach Using Community Structures of Weighted Function Call Graphs
title_short An Android Malware Detection Approach Using Community Structures of Weighted Function Call Graphs
title_sort android malware detection approach using community structures of weighted function call graphs
topic Malware
community structures
machine learning
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7964684/
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