Android Malware Detection Based on Structural Features of the Function Call Graph

• Main Authors: Yang Yang, Xuehui Du, Zhi Yang, Xing Liu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-01-01
• Series: Electronics
• Subjects: Android; malware detection; function call graph; graph convolutional network
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/10/2/186

The openness of Android operating system not only brings convenience to users, but also leads to the attack threat from a large number of malicious applications (apps). Thus malware detection has become the research focus in the field of mobile security. In order to solve the problem of more coarse-grained feature selection and larger feature loss of graph structure existing in the current detection methods, we put forward a method named DGCNDroid for Android malware detection, which is based on the deep graph convolutional network. Our method starts by generating a function call graph for the decompiled Android application. Then the function call subgraph containing the sensitive application programming interface (API) is extracted. Finally, the function call subgraphs with structural features are trained as the input of the deep graph convolutional network. Thus the detection and classification of malicious apps can be realized. Through experimentation on a dataset containing 11,120 Android apps, the method proposed in this paper can achieve detection accuracy of 98.2%, which is higher than other existing detection methods.