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Leveraging the first line of defense: a study on the evolution and usage of android security permissions for enhanced android malware detection

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Abstract

Android security permissions are built-in security features that constrain what an app can do and access on the system, that is, its privileges. Permissions have been widely used for Android malware detection, mostly in combination with other relevant app attributes. The available set of permissions is dynamic, refined in every new Android OS version release. The refinement process adds new permissions and deprecates others. These changes directly impact the type and prevalence of permissions requested by malware and legitimate applications over time. Furthermore, malware trends and benign apps’ inherent evolution influence their requested permissions. Therefore, the usage of these features in machine learning-based malware detection systems is prone to concept drift issues. Despite that, no previous study related to permissions has taken into account concept drift. In this study, we demonstrate that when concept drift is addressed, permissions can generate long-lasting and effective malware detection systems. Furthermore, the discriminatory capabilities of distinct set of features are tested. We found that the initial set of permissions, defined in Android 1.0 (API level 1), are sufficient to build an effective detection model, providing an average 0.93 F1 score in data that spans seven years. In addition, we explored and characterized permissions evolution using local and global interpretation methods. In this regard, the varying importance of individual permissions for malware and benign software recognition tasks over time are analyzed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Software Science, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia

    Alejandro Guerra-Manzanares & Hayretdin Bahsi

  2. Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

    Marcin Luckner

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  1. Alejandro Guerra-Manzanares
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Appendices

Appendix A. Two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistical test

Fig. 15
figure 15

Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to compare F1 for the reduced and extended feature sets. The maximum distance between EDFs is 0.04 (marked in the graph with red dots).

Full size image

To formally compare the performance of both feature sets (i.e., extended vs. reduced), the non-parametric Kolmogorov–Smirnov test was used to analyze the equality of both probability distributions (i.e., two-sample K–S test). The test statistic quantifies the distance between the empirical distribution functions (EDF) of two data samples. In our case, the distribution of F1 score data is compared for the reduced and extended feature sets. The results show that with a p-value = 0.7634, the test cannot be the basis for \(H_0\) rejection that the F1 score distributions come from the same distribution. Moreover, the K–S statistic value, which reflects the maximum distance between the EDFs, is relatively small (i.e., K–S = 0.04). The test cumulative density function (ECDF) is illustrated in Fig. 15. Thus, it can be concluded that there is no significant difference in detection performance between the compared feature sets.

Table 2 Significantly different (\(p<0.005\)) features used to maximize recall and specificity for the reduced feature set
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Table 3 Android permission feature set evolution
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Appendix B. Wilcoxon signed-rank test

Wilcoxon signed-rank test is a non-parametric statistical hypothesis test (i.e., no normality distribution is assumed) that enables the comparison of two data distributions (i.e., specificity and recall in this case). However, the test requires the same amount of data on both distributions and, in our particular case, as not all features were found important in all periods, there were missing values in quarters regarding specific features. The quantity of missing values is critical. The data for the reduced vector showed nearly 70% missing values while reaching 83% for the extended vector. Therefore, the statistical analysis was performed only on the reduced feature set data. In this regard, as the negative values of function (4) are unknown but are needed for the test, a solution could be replacing missing values with zero values. Yet, the large missing value ratio might bias the comparison results, groundlessly increasing the similarity of the vector with a large number of missing values. Therefore, a better approach is to replace the missing values with the mean importance of the feature, calculated for the given data set and taken as a negative value. Thus, vectors are compared using means when the number of missing values is high and using the distribution of importance otherwise.

The results of the Wilcoxon test are reported in Table 2, calculated for the reduced feature set, and used to distinguish permissions important to optimize specificity and recall tasks. The table reports the features with a p-value less than 0.005, which suggests a highly significant difference between the compared vectors. The occurrence refers to the number of not missing values in the compared vectors (i.e., the number of times the feature was found important in recall or specificity). The maximum and total importance are provided for each feature. The maximum importance reflects the maximum value of importance the feature had in any quarter, while the total importance is the cumulative importance of the specific feature in all quarters. The features are ordered based on the completeness of the data vectors (i.e., from a larger number of occurrences to a smaller number).

As reported in Table 2, among the 44 shared features found important for both recognition tasks, 29 showed statistically significant differences with a p-value \(< 0.005\). Among these important features showing significantly distinct importance distributions for malware detection and benign software recognition, there are relevant concept drift-related features such as READ_PHONE_STATE, SEND_SMS, and MOUNT_UNMOUNT_FILESYSTEMS. Apart from the large total importance, all these features have high occurrence and the largest maximum importance values. In all cases, the obtained importance is significantly higher for specificity. Therefore, based on this table, it can be concluded that important features for benign app recognition (i.e., specificity) are not equally relevant for the malware recognition task (i.e., recall).

Appendix C. Android permission set evolution

Table 3 provides the modifications that changed the available set of Android security permissions over time. This table gives a notion of the dynamic character of the permission set and its evolution throughout the whole Android lifetime. The permissions set was first defined for API level 1 (i.e., the first release of Android) and has been constantly modified since then. Table 3 provides the evolution of the available permission set from API level 1 to API level 30. The table is ordered chronologically based on API level release (i.e., from the oldest to the latest), and it provides API level-related information such as release date (i.e., Date) and OS version name. For each API level (i.e., rows), the added and deprecated permissions in the corresponding API level are provided in the Added Permissions and Deprecated Permissions columns. Furthermore, for each added permission, the protection level is provided in the column Type. Three protection levels are defined: dangerous, normal and others, reported as D, N and O, respectively. The others category refers to permissions that can be requested by third-party apps and that do not belong to the dangerous or normal category, as defined in the official documentation [21]. If the permission cannot be used by third-party apps, it is referenced with a hyphen (-). For each deprecated permission, the API level that introduced the permission is provided within parenthesis. Lastly, the column Set reports the number of available permissions (i.e., excluding deprecated) in each API level.

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Guerra-Manzanares, A., Bahsi, H. & Luckner, M. Leveraging the first line of defense: a study on the evolution and usage of android security permissions for enhanced android malware detection. J Comput Virol Hack Tech 19, 65–96 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11416-022-00432-3

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