A Review of Android Malware Detection Approaches Based on Machine Learning

Abstract

Android applications are developing rapidly across the mobile ecosystem, but Android malware is also emerging in an endless stream. Many researchers have studied the problem of Android malware detection and have put forward theories and methods from different perspectives. Existing research suggests that machine learning is an effective and promising way to detect Android malware. Notwithstanding, there exist reviews that have surveyed different issues related to Android malware detection based on machine learning. We believe our work complements the previous reviews by surveying a wider range of aspects of the topic. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of Android malware detection approaches based on machine learning. We briefly introduce some background on Android applications, including the Android system architecture, security mechanisms, and classification of Android malware. Then, taking machine learning as the focus, we analyze and summarize the research status from key perspectives such as sample acquisition, data preprocessing, feature selection, machine learning models, algorithms, and the evaluation of detection effectiveness. Finally, we assess the future prospects for research into Android malware detection based on machine learning. This review will help academics gain a full picture of Android malware detection based on machine learning. It could then serve as a basis for subsequent researchers to start new work and help to guide research in the field more generally.

Keywords

• Android security
• malware detection
• machine learning
• feature extraction
• classifier evaluation