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Android malware detection using convolutional neural networks and data section images

Published: 09 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The paper proposes a new technique to detect Android malware effectively based on converting malware binaries into images and applying machine learning techniques on those images. Existing research converts the whole executable files (e.g., DEX files in Android application package) of target apps into images and uses them for machine learning. However, the entire DEX file (consisting of header section, identifier section, data section, optional link data area, etc.) might contain noisy information for malware detection. In this paper, we convert only data sections of DEX files into grayscale images and apply machine learning on the images with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). By using only the data sections for 5,377 malicious and 6,249 benign apps, our technique reduces the storage capacity by 17.5% on average compared to using the whole DEX files. We apply two CNN models, Inception-v3 and Inception-ResNet-v2, which are known to be efficient in image processing, and examine the effectiveness of our technique in terms of accuracy. Experiment results show that the proposed technique achieves better accuracy with smaller storage capacity than the approach using the whole DEX files. Inception-ResNet-v2 with the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm reaches 98.02% accuracy.

References

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J. Gennissen, 2017. Gamut: Sifting through Images to Detect Android Malware. Bachelor thesis. Royal Holloway University, London, UK
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Cited By

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  • (2024)Visualising Static Features and Classifying Android Malware Using a Convolutional Neural Network ApproachApplied Sciences10.3390/app1411477214:11(4772)Online publication date: 31-May-2024
  • (2024)Image-based detection and classification of Android malware through CNN modelsProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security10.1145/3664476.3670441(1-11)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Android Malware Detection and Prevention Based on Deep Learning and Tweets Analysis2024 6th International Conference on Computing and Informatics (ICCI)10.1109/ICCI61671.2024.10485022(153-157)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2024
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    RACS '18: Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Research in Adaptive and Convergent Systems
    October 2018
    355 pages
    ISBN:9781450358859
    DOI:10.1145/3264746
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 09 October 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. Android malware
    2. CNN
    3. data section
    4. grayscale image

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Visualising Static Features and Classifying Android Malware Using a Convolutional Neural Network ApproachApplied Sciences10.3390/app1411477214:11(4772)Online publication date: 31-May-2024
    • (2024)Image-based detection and classification of Android malware through CNN modelsProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security10.1145/3664476.3670441(1-11)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Android Malware Detection and Prevention Based on Deep Learning and Tweets Analysis2024 6th International Conference on Computing and Informatics (ICCI)10.1109/ICCI61671.2024.10485022(153-157)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2024
    • (2024)Detection approaches for android malware: Taxonomy and review analysisExpert Systems with Applications10.1016/j.eswa.2023.122255238(122255)Online publication date: Mar-2024
    • (2023)Android Malware Detection Methods Based on Convolutional Neural Network: A SurveyIEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence10.1109/TETCI.2023.32818337:5(1330-1350)Online publication date: Oct-2023
    • (2023)Status and Outlook of Image-based Malware Detection Technology2023 3rd International Symposium on Computer Technology and Information Science (ISCTIS)10.1109/ISCTIS58954.2023.10213085(598-603)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2023
    • (2023)Windows Malware Hunting with InceptionResNetv2 Assisted Malware Visualization ApproachProceedings of International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Data Engineering10.1007/978-981-99-0609-3_12(171-188)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2023
    • (2022)A Multifaceted Deep Generative Adversarial Networks Model for Mobile Malware DetectionApplied Sciences10.3390/app1219940312:19(9403)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2022
    • (2022)Explainable Artificial Intelligence-Based IoT Device Malware Detection Mechanism Using Image Visualization and Fine-Tuned CNN-Based Transfer Learning ModelComputational Intelligence and Neuroscience10.1155/2022/76719672022Online publication date: 15-Jul-2022
    • (2022)NLP Technique for Malware Detection Using 1D CNN Fusion ModelSecurity and Communication Networks10.1155/2022/29572032022(1-9)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2022
    • Show More Cited By

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