Suspicious Permissions Detection of Covid-19 Themed Malicious Android Applications

The malicious actors continuously produce malicious Android applications with a COVID-19 theme in the context of the pandemic. Users frequently grant the necessary permissions to install those phoney apps without paying much attention. Android permissions are essential points of weakness. Major privacy issues often result from this vulnerability. Hackers with malicious intent have viewed the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to conduct malware attacks to profit financially and advance their nefarious goals. Through COVID-19-related content, people are becoming victims of phishing scams. The android malware seen explicitly during the pandemic of Covid-19 is discussed in this study, and we next analyze malware detection methods with a focus on these Covid-19-Themed malware mobile applications. This research paper attempts to identify dangerous android permissions and the malware families that erupted during the Covid-19 outbreak. © 2023 IEEE.

Systematic Review on Various Techniques of Android Malware Detection

Smartphone has become the 4th basic necessity of human being after Food, Cloths and Home. It has become an integral part of the life that most of the business and office work can be operated by mobile phone and the demand for online classes demand for all class of students have become a compulsion without any alternate due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Android is considered as the most prevailing and used operating system for the mobile phone on this planet and for the same reason it is the most targeted mobile operating system by the hackers. Android malware has been increasing every quarter and every year. An android malware is installed and executed on the smartphones quietly without any indication and user’s acceptance, that possess threats to the consumer’s personal and/or classified information stored. To address these threats, varieties of techniques have been proposed by the researchers like Static, Dynamic and Hybrid. In this paper a systematic review has been carried out on the relevant studies from 2017 to 2020. Assessment of the malware detection capabilities of various techniques used by different researchers has been carried out with comparison of the performance of different machine learning models for the detection of android malwares by assessing the results of empirical evidences such as datasets, features, tools, etc. However the android malware detection still faces several challenges and the possible solution with some novel approach or technique to improve the detection capabilities is discussed in the discussion and conclusion. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

AMDetector: Detecting Large-Scale and Novel Android Malware Traffic with Meta-learning

In the severe COVID-19 environment, encrypted mobile malware is increasingly threatening personal privacy, especially those targeting on Android platform. Existing methods mainly focus on extracting features from Android Malware (DroidMal) by reversing the binary samples, which is sensitive to the deduction of the available samples. Thus, they fail to tackle the insufficiency of the novel DoridMal. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate an effective solution to classify large-scale DroidMal, as well as to detect the novel one. We consider few-shot DroidMal detection as DoridMal encrypted network traffic classification and propose an image-based method with meta-learning, namely AMDetector, to address the issues. By capturing network traffic produced by DroidMal, samples are augmented and thus cater to the learning algorithms. Firstly, DroidMal encrypted traffic is converted to session images. Then, session images are embedded into a high dimension metric space, in which traffic samples can be linearly separated by computing the distance with the corresponding prototype. Large-scale and novel DroidMal traffic is classified by applying different meta-learning strategies. Experimental results on public datasets have demonstrated the capability of our method to classify large-scale known DroidMal traffic as well as to detect the novel one. It is encouraging to see that, our model achieves superior performance on known and novel DroidMal traffic classification among the state-of-the-arts. Moreover, AMDetector is able to classify the unseen cross-platform malware. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Applications of artificial intelligence to detect android botnets: A Survey

With the growing popularity of Android smart devices, and especially with the recent advances brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic on digital adoption and transformation, the importance of protecting these devices has grown, as they carry very sensitive data. Malicious attacks are targeting Android since it is open source and has the highest adoption rate among mobile platforms. Botnet attacks are one of the most often forgotten types of attacks. In addition, there is a lack of review papers that can clarify the state of knowledge and indicate research gaps in detecting android botnets. Therefore, in this paper, we conduct a literature review to highlight the contributions of several studies in the domain of Android Botnet detection. This study attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of the deployed AI apps for future academics interested in performing Android Botnet Detection studies. We focused on the applications of artificial intelligence and its two prominent subdomains, machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques. The study presents available Android Botnet datasets suitable for detection using ML and DL algorithms. Moreover, this study provides an overview of the methodologies and tools utilized in APK analysis. The paper also serves as a comprehensive taxonomy of Android Botnet detection methods and highlights a number of challenges encountered while analyzing Android Botnet detection techniques. The research gaps indicated an absence of hybrid analysis research in the area, as well as a lack of an up-to-date dataset and a time-series dataset. The findings of this paper show valuable prospective directions for future research and development opportunities. Author

COVID-Themed Android Malware Analysis and Detection Framework Based on Permissions

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic the malicious actors actively creating COVID-themed android malicious apps and without much attention user may often grant all the required permissions to install those fake apps. The Android permissions are crucial sources of vulnerability. This vulnerability often leads to major privacy threats. In this work COVID-themed android malwares were collected and analyzed to develop a detection framework based on the static feature permission and machine learning techniques. The proposed system analyses 100 COVID-themed fake applications which released in 2020. The sensitive permissions are selected using Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) technique. The study shows better accuracy of 0.830 and 0.812 with Decision tree classifier and Random forest classifier respectively. © 2022 IEEE.

Effectiveness of Video-Classification in Android Malware Detection Through API-Streams and CNN-LSTM Autoencoders

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced worldwide employees to massive use of their mobile devices to access corporate systems. This new scenario has made mobile devices more susceptible to malicious applications, which are yearly developed to conduct several hostile activities. Concerned about this fact, many Deep Learning (DL) based solutions have been proposed, in the last decade, by considering both static and dynamic approaches. However, static solutions are adversely affected by obfuscation techniques and polymorphic applications, while dynamic ones cannot reduce the damages caused during applications execution. To this purpose, the following paper aims to propose a novel approach called API-Streams to minimize damages at Run-time. Therefore, we investigate several Video-Classification tasks through CNN-LSTM Autoencoders (CNN-LSTM-AEs). More precisely, we combine the capability of AEs in finding compact features with the classification abilities of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), and we show that the proposed approach achieves an average accuracy of 98% in the presence of several unbalanced training datasets. Finally, we use the t-Stochastic Neighbor Embedded (t-SNE) representation technique to investigate the abilities of the employed AE to cluster data into their respective classes by limiting their overlapping. © 2022, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.