Intelligent Hybrid Approach for Android Malware Detection based on Permissions and API Calls

Android malware is rapidly becoming a potential threat to users. The number of Android malware is growing exponentially; they become significantly sophisticated and cause potential financial and information losses for users. Hence, there is a need for effective and efficient techniques to detect the Android malware applications. This paper proposes an intelligent hybrid approach for Android malware detection using the permissions and API calls in the Android application. The proposed approach consists of two steps. The first step involves finding the most significant permissions and Application Programming Interfaces (API) calls that leads to efficient discrimination between the malware and good ware applications. For this purpose, two features selection algorithms, Information Gain (IG) and Pearson CorrCoef (PC) are employed to rank the individual permissions and API’s calls based on their importance for classification. In the second step, the proposed new hybrid approach for Android malware detection based on the combination of the Adaptive neural fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) with the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), is employed to differentiate between the malware and goodware Android applications (apps). The PSO is intelligently utilized to optimize the ANFIS parameters by tuning its membership functions to generate reliable and more precise fuzzy rules for Android apps classification. Using a dataset consists of 250 goodware and 250 malware apps collected from different recourse, the conducted experiments show that the suggested method for Android malware detection is effective and achieved an accuracy of 89%. Keywords—Android malware detection; features selection; fuzzy inference system; particle swarm optimization