Evaluation of machine learning classifiers for mobile malware detection

Mobile devices have become a significant part of people’s lives, leading to an increasing number of users involved with such technology. The rising number of users invites hackers to generate malicious applications. Besides, the security of sensitive data available on mobile devices is taken lightly. Relying on currently developed approaches is not sufficient, given that intelligent malware keeps modifying rapidly and as a result becomes more difficult to detect. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution to evaluating malware detection using the anomaly-based approach with machine learning classifiers. Among the various network traffic features, the four categories selected are basic information, content based, time based and connection based. The evaluation utilizes two datasets: public (i.e. MalGenome) and private (i.e. self-collected). Based on the evaluation results, both the Bayes network and random forest classifiers produced more accurate readings, with a 99.97 % true-positive rate (TPR) as opposed to the multi-layer perceptron with only 93.03 % on the MalGenome dataset. However, this experiment revealed that the k-nearest neighbor classifier efficiently detected the latest Android malware with an 84.57 % true-positive rate higher than other classifiers.