Android based malware detection using a multifeature collaborative decision fusion approach

Smart mobile device usage has expanded at a very high rate all over the world. Since the mobile devices nowadays are used for a wide variety of application areas like personal communication, data storage and entertainment, security threats emerge, comparable to those which a conventional PC is exposed to. Mobile malware has been growing in scale and complexity as smartphone usage continues to rise. Android has surpassed other mobile platforms as the most popular whilst also witnessing a dramatic increase in malware targeting the platform. In this work, we have considered Android based malware for analysis and a scalable detection mechanism is designed using multifeature collaborative decision fusion (MCDF). The different features of a malicious file like the permission based features and the API call based features are considered in order to provide a better detection by training an ensemble of classifiers and combining their decisions using collaborative approach based on probability theory. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated on a collection of Android based malware comprising of different malware families and the results show that our approach give a better performance than state-of-the-art ensemble schemes available. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.