A Client/Server Malware Detection Model Based on Machine Learning for Android Devices

Abstract

The rapid adoption of Android devices comes with the growing prevalence of mobile malware, which leads to serious threats to mobile phone security and attacks private information on mobile devices. In this paper, we designed and implemented a model for malware detection on Android devices to protect private and financial information, for the mobile applications of the ATISCOM project. This model is based on client/server architecture, to reduce the heavy computations on a mobile device by sending data from the mobile device to the server for remote processing (i.e., offloading) of the predictions. We then gradually optimized our proposed model for better classification of the newly installed applications on Android devices. We at first adopted Naive Bayes to build the model with 92.4486% accuracy, then the classification method that gave the best accuracy of 93.85% for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with binary class (i.e., malware and benign), and finally the regression method with numerical values ranging from −100 to 100 to manage the uncertainty predictions. Therefore, our proposed model with random forest regression gives a good accuracy in terms of performance, with a good correlation coefficient, minimum computation time and the smallest number of errors for malware detection.

Keywords

• Android devices
• mobile malware
• mobile applications
• malware detection
• client/server architecture
• offloading