Enhancing RansomwareElite App for Detection of Ransomware in Android Applications

Abstract

As the number of android applications (apps) available in the market are increasing rapidly, various types of security attacks using the android apps are also increasing with the same pace. The ransomware attack is one of these kind of security attacks in which the attackers locks the user's phone, encrypts user's data or blocks the user's access to their own data and threatens the user to pay a ransom to gain the access back. This cyber-threat is terrorizing the world from many years as it performs mimicry attacks i. e. combination of encryption & locking attacks. Android devices are more prone to these ransomware attacks compared to Windows and IOS devices. RansomwareElite is an android application which detects the presence of ransomware in the apps installed on an android device by checking the presence of any threatening text in app code or by verifying the permissions requested by the app from the user. In this paper, we focused on improving the performance of RansomwareElite app by extending its features. Now, the RansomwareElite app also searches the presence of any threatening image or file containing threatening text by analyzing the Android Package Kit(APK) file of android app. Moreover, it also detects some specific methods and classes in the code of the APK which could be used for locking the device and checks some specific permissions requested, for uninstalled apps now. Further, it maintains a database on the online server for the records of all the suspicious and ransomware apps detected by RansomwareElite. We have tested RansomwareElite with 9 Test Apps which are manually created based on the features of ransomware family and on 48 android devices. After analyzing the test results, we have found that the performance of RansomwareElite is improved after incorporating the new features and RansomwareElite app detects the presence of ransomware in installed as well as uninstalled apps present on an android's device in an efficient manner.