MFDroid: A Stacking Ensemble Learning Framework for Android Malware Detection

Abstract

As Android is a popular a mobile operating system, Android malware is on the rise, which poses a great threat to user privacy and security. Considering the poor detection effects of the single feature selection algorithm and the low detection efficiency of traditional machine learning methods, we propose an Android malware detection framework based on stacking ensemble learning—MFDroid—to identify Android malware. In this paper, we used seven feature selection algorithms to select permissions, API calls, and opcodes, and then merged the results of each feature selection algorithm to obtain a new feature set. Subsequently, we used this to train the base learner, and set the logical regression as a meta-classifier, to learn the implicit information from the output of base learners and obtain the classification results. After the evaluation, the F1-score of MFDroid reached 96.0%. Finally, we analyzed each type of feature to identify the differences between malicious and benign applications. At the end of this paper, we present some general conclusions. In recent years, malicious applications and benign applications have been similar in terms of permission requests. In other words, the model of training, only with permission, can no longer effectively or efficiently distinguish malicious applications from benign applications.

Keywords

• Android malware
• ensemble learning
• machine learning
• static analysis
• feature selection