Lightweight Security Auditing Tool for Android Smart Mobile Phone

Abstract

In this MSc thesis we design and implement a host based lightweight security auditing tool that suits resource-constrained mobile devices in terms of low storage and computational requirements. Our proposed solution utilizes the open nature of the Android operating system and uses the public APIs provided by the Android SDK to collect features of known-benign and known-malicious applications. The collected features are then provided to machine learning algorithm to develop a baseline classification model. This classification model is then used to classify new or unknown applications either as malware or goodware and if it is malware it alerts the user about the infection. Our proposed solution has been tested by analyzing both malicious and benign applications collected from different websites. The technique used is shown to be an effective means of detecting malware and alerting users about detection of malware, which suggests that it has the capability to stop the spread of the attack since once the user is aware of the malicious application he can take measures by uninstalling the application. Experimental results show that the proposed solution has detection rate of 96.73% in RandomForest machine learning model which is used during the final development of our proposed solution as an Android application and low rate of false positive rate(0.01). Performance impact on the Android system can also be ignored which is only 3.7-5.6% CPU overhead, 3-4% of RAM overhead and the battery exhaustion is only 2%.

Publication
MSc Manuscript
Date