electronics Article A Hierarchical Approach for Android Malware Detection Using Authorization-Sensitive Features Hui Chen 1,2,† , Zhengqiang Li 1,†, Qingshan Jiang 1,* , Abdur Rasool 1,2 and Lifei Chen 3 1 Shenzhen Key Lab for High Performance Data Mining, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China;
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[email protected] (A.R.) 2 Shenzhen College of Advanced Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China 3 College of Mathematics and Informatics, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou 350007, China;
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[email protected]; Tel.: +86-186-6532-6469 † These authors contributed equally to this work. Abstract: Android’s openness has made it a favorite for consumers and developers alike, driving strong app consumption growth. Meanwhile, its popularity also attracts attackers’ attention. Android malware is continually raising issues for the user’s privacy and security. Hence, it is of great practical value to develop a scientific and versatile system for Android malware detection. This paper presents a hierarchical approach to design a malware detection system for Android. It extracts four authorization- sensitive features: basic blocks, permissions, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and key functions, and layer-by-layer detects malware based on the similar module and the proposed deep learning model Convolutional Neural Network and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (CNNXGB). This detection approach focuses not only on classification but also on the details of the similarities between malware software. We serialize the key function in light of the sequence of API calls and pick up a similar module that captures the global semantics of malware.