Machine learning and deep learning techniques for detecting malicious android applications: An empirical analysis

The open system architecture of android makes it vulnerable to a variety of cyberattacks. Cybercriminals use android applications to intrude into the system and steal confidential data. This situation poses a threat to user privacy and integrity of the system. This paper proposes a static analysis approach to detect malicious and benign Android applications using various machine learning and deep learning algorithms. The proposed work has been validated using a bench marked dataset comprising 11,449 benign and malicious Android applications. The proposed approach applies a wrapper-based feature selection method to filter irrelevant features. The results clearly show that the deep learning algorithms of DBN and MLP outperformed machine learning algorithms in detecting malicious Android applications.