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RAMSES: Revealing Android Malware Through String Extraction and Selection

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Abstract

The relevance of malicious software targeting mobile devices has been increasing in recent years. Smartphones, tablet computers or embedded devices in general represent one of the most spread computing platform worldwide and an unsecure usage can cause unprecedented damage to private users, companies and public institutions. To help in identifying malicious software on mobile platforms, we propose RAMSES, an approach based on the static content stored as strings within an application. First we extract the contents of strings, transforming applications into documents, then using information retrieval techniques, we select the most relevant features based on frequency metrics, and finally we classify applications using machine learning algorithms relying on such features. We evaluate our methods using real datasets of Android applications and show promising results for detection.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats/a#phone-shipments, accessed on 04/30/2014.

  2. 2.

    https://blog.lookout.com/blog/2013/04/19/the-bearer-of-badnews-malware-google-play/, accessed on 04/30/2014.

  3. 3.

    http://thehackernews.com/2013/03/google-f-secure-can-say-that-anything.html accessed on 04/30/2014.

  4. 4.

    http://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792255/Kaspersky_Security_Bulletin_2012_The_overall_statistics_for_2012 accessed on 04/30/2014.

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Acknowledgement

The Authors would like to thank the National Research Fund of Luxembourg (FNR) for providing financial support trought CORE 2010 MOVE Project.

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Correspondence to Lautaro Dolberg .

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© 2015 Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Dolberg, L., Jérôme, Q., François, J., State, R., Engel, T. (2015). RAMSES: Revealing Android Malware Through String Extraction and Selection. In: Tian, J., Jing, J., Srivatsa, M. (eds) International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2014. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 152. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23829-6_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23829-6_34

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-23828-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-23829-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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