End-Edge Coordinated Inference for Real-Time BYOD Malware Detection using Deep Learning

Abstract

Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) has been widely viewed as a definite trend among enterprises in which employees bring and use their personal smartphones for work. Despite the perceived opportunities of increasing productivity and reducing costs, BYOD raises severe security and privacy concerns: the corporate networks and data are directly exposed to malware apps running on the personal smartphones. This highlights the necessity for performing real-time mobile malware detection in BYOD environments. Deep learning seems to be a natural choice to handle such detection, due to its state-of-the-art detection effectiveness. However, deep learning inference is usually too computationally complex for resource-constrained smartphones, and the communication overhead of cloud-based inference may be unacceptable. As a result, it is hard to seek the tradeoff between the real-time demand and optimality of detection accuracy. In this paper, we tackle this issue by proposing an endedge coordinated inference approach that can support highlyaccurate and average latency guaranteed malware detection. Our proposed approach integrates the early-exit and model partitioning methods to allow fast, correct and smartphonelocalized inference to occur frequently. Extensive evaluations are carried out, demonstrating that our proposed approach offers a good compromise between detection accuracy and efficiency.