Detection of Evasive Android Malware Using EigenGCN

Abstract

Recently there is an upsurge in Android malware that use obfuscation and repackaging techniques for evasion. Malware may also combine both these techniques to create stealthy adversarial mimicry samples to launch mimicry attacks. In mimicry attacks, the adversary makes sure that the static and dynamic features present in the crafted malware mimics the features present in the legitimate applications. In such cases, the existing detection mechanisms may become less effective. We found that the malicious nature of Android applications can be determined by identifying certain subgraphs that appear in their system call graphs. These subgraphs can be determined with the help of spectral clustering mechanism present in EigenGCN. With this, the system call graph $G$ will be partitioned into two subgraphs $G_1$ and $G_2$, in which the malicious functionality if any will be present in the subgraph $G_1$. The graph Fourier transform based pooling technique in EigenGCN then computes the features of the subgraphs in the form of graph signals. This graph signals serve as a robust signature to detect malware. The proposed mechanism gave an accuracy of 98.7% on common malware, 97.3% on obfuscated malware, 97.8% on repackaged malware, and 90% on adversarial mimicry malware datasets. As far as we know, this is the first work that proposes a malware detection mechanism, that can detect common as well as obfuscated, repackaged, and mimicry malware in Android.