Machine Learning-Based Adaptive Genetic Algorithm for Android Malware Detection in Auto-Driving Vehicles

The growing trend toward vehicles being connected to various unidentified devices, such as other vehicles or infrastructure, increases the possibility of external attacks on"vehicle cybersecurity (VC). Detection of intrusion is a very important part of network security for vehicles such as connected vehicles, that have open connectivity, and self-driving vehicles. Consequently, security has become an important requirement in trying to protect these vehicles as attackers have become more sophisticated in using malware that can penetrate and harm vehicle control units as technology advances. Thus, ensuring the vehicles and the network are safe is very important for the growth of the automotive industry and for people to have more faith in it. In this study, a machine learning-based detection approach using hybrid analysis-based particle swarm optimization (PSO) and an adaptive genetic algorithm (AGA) is presented for Android malware detection in auto-driving vehicles. The "CCCS-CIC-AndMal-2020" dataset containing 13 different malware categories and 9504 hybrid features was used for the experiments. In the proposed approach, firstly, feature selection is performed by applying PSO to the features in the dataset. In the next step, the performance of XGBoost and random forest (RF) machine learning classifiers is optimized using the AGA. In the experiments performed, a 99.82% accuracy and F-score were obtained with the XGBoost classifier, which was developed using PSO-based feature selection and AGA-based hyperparameter optimization. With the random forest classifier, a 98.72% accuracy and F-score were achieved. Our results show that the application of PSO and an AGA greatly increases the performance in the classification of the information obtained from the hybrid analysis.