DeepMDFC: A deep learning based android malware detection and family classification method

Abstract Unprecedented growth and prevalent adoption of the Android Operating System (OS) have triggered a substantial transformation, not only within the smartphone industry but across various categories of intelligent devices. These intelligent devices store a wealth of sensitive data, making them enticing targets for malicious individuals who create harmful Android applications to steal this data for malicious purposes. While numerous Android malware detection methods have been proposed, the exponential growth in sophisticated and malicious Android apps presents an unprecedented challenge to existing detection techniques. Some of the researchers have attempted to classify malicious Android applications into families through static analysis of applications but most of them are evaluated on applications of previous API levels. This paper introduces a novel dataset compromising of 2019 to 2021 applications and proposes a Deep Learning based Malware Detection and Family Classification method (DeepMDFC) to detect and classify emerging malicious Android applications through static analysis and deep Artificial Neural Networks. Experimental findings indicate that DeepMDFC surpasses standard machine learning algorithms, achieving accuracy rates of 99.3% and 96.7% for Android malware detection and classification, respectively, with a limited size feature set. The performance of DeepMDFC is also assessed using the benchmark dataset (DREBIN) and results showed that DeepMDFC surpasses these methods in terms of performance. Furthermore, it leverages the proposed dataset to construct a prediction model that adeptly identifies malicious Android applications from both the years 2022 and 2023. This process the potency and resilience of DeepMDFC against emerging Android applications.