Android-COCO: Android Malware Detection with Graph Neural Network for Byte- and Native-Code

With the popularity of Android growing exponentially, the amount of malware has significantly exploded. It is arguably one of the most viral problems on mobile platforms. Recently, various approaches have been introduced to detect Android malware, the majority of these are either based on the Manifest File features or the structural information, such as control flow graph and API calls. Among those methods, nearly all of them only consider the Java byte-code as the target to detect malicious behaviors. However, Recent research and our own statistics show that native payloads are commonly used in both benign and malicious apps. Current state-of-the-art Android static analysis tools avoid handling native method invocation. None of those tools have the capability to capture the inter-language behaviors. In this work, we explore an ensemble mechanism, which presents how the combination of byte-code and native-code analysis of Android applications can be efficiently used to cope with the advanced sophistication of Android malware. We, therefore, present a multi-layer approach that utilizes deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), as well as graph embedding techniques to handle the threats of Android malware, both from the Java byte-code and native code. After that, we design an ensemble algorithm to get the final result of malware detection system. To be specific, the first layer of our detection approach operates on the byte-code of application and the native code level, whereas the second layer focuses on the ensemble algorithm. Large-scale experiments on 100,113 samples (35,113 malware and 65,000 benign) show that only byte-code sub-system yields 99.8% accuracy and native-code sub-system yields an accuracy of 96.6%, whereas the Android-COCO method attains an accuracy of 99.86% which outperforms various related works.

Peng Xu · 2021