Better Call Graphs: A New Dataset of Function Call Graphs for Malware Classification

TL;DR

This paper introduces Better Call Graphs, a large, diverse dataset of Android function call graphs designed to improve malware classification and address limitations of existing datasets.

Contribution

The paper presents a new, high-quality Android-specific FCG dataset that enhances malware detection research by providing more representative and diverse data.

Findings

Baseline experiments show improved classification accuracy with BCG

Existing datasets are outdated and limited in diversity

BCG enables more reliable evaluation of malware detection methods

Abstract

Function call graphs (FCGs) have emerged as a powerful abstraction for malware detection, capturing the behavioral structure of applications beyond surface-level signatures. Their utility in traditional program analysis has been well established, enabling effective classification and analysis of malicious software. In the mobile domain, especially in the Android ecosystem, FCG-based malware classification is particularly critical due to the platform's widespread adoption and the complex, component-based structure of Android apps. However, progress in this direction is hindered by the lack of large-scale, high-quality Android-specific FCG datasets. Existing datasets are often outdated, dominated by small or redundant graphs resulting from app repackaging, and fail to reflect the diversity of real-world malware. These limitations lead to overfitting and unreliable evaluation of graph-based classification methods. To address this gap, we introduce Better Call Graphs (BCG), a comprehensive dataset of large and unique FCGs extracted from recent Android application packages (APKs). BCG includes both benign and malicious samples spanning various families and types, along with graph-level features for each APK. Through extensive experiments using baseline classifiers, we demonstrate the necessity and value of BCG compared to existing datasets. BCG is publicly available at https://erdemub.github.io/BCG-dataset.