A Performance-Sensitive Malware Detection System Using Deep Learning on Mobile Devices

Currently, Android malware detection is mostly performed on the server side against the increasing number of malware. Powerful computing resource provides more exhaustive protection for app markets than maintaining detection by a single user. However, apart from the applications (apps) provided by the official market, apps from third-party resources are always causing serious security threats to end-users. Meanwhile, it is a time-consuming task if the app is downloaded first and then uploaded to the server side for detection, because the network transmission has a lot of overhead. In addition, the uploading process also suffers from the threat of attackers. Consequently, a last line of defense on mobile devices is necessary and much-needed. In this paper, we propose an effective Android malware detection system, MobiTive, leveraging customized deep neural networks to provide a real-time and responsive detection environment on mobile devices. MobiTive is a pre-installed solution rather than an app scanning and monitoring engine using after installation, which is more practical and secure. Although a deep learning-based approach can be maintained on server side efficiently for malware detection, original deep learning models cannot be directly deployed and executed on mobile devices due to various performance limitations. Therefore, we evaluate and investigate the following key points: (1) the performance of different feature extraction methods; (2) the performance of different feature type selections for deep learning on mobile; (3) the detection accuracy of different deep neural networks on mobile; (4) the real-time detection performance and accuracy on mobile; (5) the potential based on the evolution trend of mobile devices' specifications; and finally we further propose a practical solution (MobiTive) to detect Android malware on mobile.