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An Android Malware Detection Method Using Better API Contextual Information

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Information Security and Cryptology (Inscrypt 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14527))

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Abstract

The vast popularity of the Android platform has fueled the rapid expansion of Android malware and existing detection methods are difficult to effectively detect malware. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose an Android malware detection method using better API contextual information (BACI). Firstly, BACI extracts the function call graph from each app. Then, we optimize the call graph by removing nodes of unknown functions while ensuring the connectivity between their predecessor and successor nodes. The optimized call graph can extract more robust API contextual information that accurately represents app behavior. Thirdly, we map the optimized call graph into a feature vector for malware detection, including three steps: call pairs extraction, call pairs abstraction, and one-hot mapping. Finally, machine learning classifiers are used for malware detection. The experimental results demonstrate that BACI greatly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods and can effectively detect Android malware.

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62201576, U1833107), the Scientific Research Project of the Tianjin Municipal Education Commission (Grant No. 2019KJ127), the Supporting Fund Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 3122023PT10), and the Discipline Development Funds of Civil Aviation University of China.

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Correspondence to Liang Zhang or Ze Hu .

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Yang, H., Wang, Y., Zhang, L., Hu, Z., Jiang, L., Cheng, X. (2024). An Android Malware Detection Method Using Better API Contextual Information. In: Ge, C., Yung, M. (eds) Information Security and Cryptology. Inscrypt 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14527. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-0945-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-0945-8_2

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