Decoding Android Malware with a Fraction of Features: An Attention-Enhanced MLP-SVM Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents an attention-enhanced MLP-SVM framework that effectively detects and classifies Android malware using only 47 carefully selected features, achieving over 99% accuracy with reduced computational complexity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid model combining attention-augmented MLP and SVM that reduces feature set size while maintaining high detection accuracy.

Findings

Achieved over 99% accuracy in malware detection.

Reduced feature set from 47 to 14 features using LDA.

Outperformed existing state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract

The escalating sophistication of Android malware poses significant challenges to traditional detection methods, necessitating innovative approaches that can efficiently identify and classify threats with high precision. This paper introduces a novel framework that synergistically integrates an attention-enhanced Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) to make Android malware detection and classification more effective. By carefully analyzing a mere 47 features out of over 9,760 available in the comprehensive CCCS-CIC-AndMal-2020 dataset, our MLP-SVM model achieves an impressive accuracy over 99% in identifying malicious applications. The MLP, enhanced with an attention mechanism, focuses on the most discriminative features and further reduces the 47 features to only 14 components using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). Despite this significant reduction in dimensionality, the SVM component, equipped with an RBF kernel, excels in mapping these components to a high-dimensional space, facilitating precise classification of malware into their respective families. Rigorous evaluations, encompassing accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics, confirm the superiority of our approach compared to existing state-of-the-art techniques. The proposed framework not only significantly reduces the computational complexity by leveraging a compact feature set but also exhibits resilience against the evolving Android malware landscape.