This book captures the state of the art research in the area of malicious code detection, prevention and mitigation. It contains cutting-edge behavior-based techniques to analyze and detect obfuscated malware. The book analyzes current trends in malware activity online, including botnets and malicious code for profit, and it proposes effective models for detection and prevention of attacks using. Furthermore, the book introduces novel techniques for creating services that protect their own integrity and safety, plus the data they manage.

Mobile devices, such as smart phones, have achieved computing and networking capabilities comparable to traditional personal computers. Their successful consumerization has also become a source of pain for adopting users and organizations. In particular, the widespread presence of information-stealing applications and other types of mobile malware raises substantial security and privacy concerns. Android Malware presents a systematic view on state-of-the-art mobile malware that targets the popular Android mobile platform. Covering key topics like the Android malware history, malware behavior and classification, as well as, possible defense techniques.

Machine learning has become key in supporting decision-making processes across a wide array of applications, ranging from autonomous vehicles to malware detection. However, while highly accurate, these algorithms have been shown to exhibit vulnerabilities, in which they could be deceived to return preferred predictions. Therefore, carefully crafted adversarial objects may impact the trust of machine learning systems compromising the reliability of their predictions, irrespective of the field in which they are deployed. The goal of this book is to improve the understanding of adversarial attacks, particularly in the malware context, and leverage the knowledge to explore defenses against adaptive adversaries. Furthermore, to study systemic weaknesses that can improve the resilience of machine learning models.

The authors develop a malware fingerprinting framework to cover accurate android malware detection and family attribution in this book. The authors emphasize the following: (1) the scalability over a large malware corpus; (2) the resiliency to common obfuscation techniques; (3) the portability over different platforms and architectures. First, the authors propose an approximate fingerprinting technique for android packaging that captures the underlying static structure of the android applications in the context of bulk and offline detection at the app-market level. This book proposes a malware clustering framework to perform malware clustering by building and partitioning the similarity network of malicious applications on top of this fingerprinting technique. Second, the authors propose an approximate fingerprinting technique that leverages dynamic analysis and natural language processing techniques to generate Android malware behavior reports. Based on this fingerprinting technique, the authors propose a portable malware detection framework employing machine learning classification. Third, the authors design an automatic framework to produce intelligence about the underlying malicious cyber-infrastructures of Android malware. The authors then leverage graph analysis techniques to generate relevant intelligence to identify the threat effects of malicious Internet activity associated with android malware. The authors elaborate on an effective android malware detection system, in the online detection context at the mobile device level. It is suitable for deployment on mobile devices, using machine learning classification on method call sequences. Also, it is resilient to common code obfuscation techniques and adaptive to operating systems and malware change overtime, using natural language processing and deep learning techniques. Researchers working in mobile and network security, machine learning and pattern recognition will find this book useful as a reference. Advanced-level students studying computer science within these topic areas will purchase this book as well.

Written by machine-learning researchers and members of the Android Security team, this all-star guide tackles the analysis and detection of malware that targets the Android operating system. This groundbreaking guide to Android malware distills years of research by machine learning experts in academia and members of Meta and Google’s Android Security teams into a comprehensive introduction to detecting common threats facing the Android eco-system today. Explore the history of Android malware in the wild since the operating system first launched and then practice static and dynamic approaches to analyzing real malware specimens. Next, examine machine learning techniques that can be used to detect malicious apps, the types of classification models that defenders can implement to achieve these detections, and the various malware features that can be used as input to these models. Adapt these machine learning strategies to the identifica-tion of malware categories like banking trojans, ransomware, and SMS fraud. You’ll: Dive deep into the source code of real malware Explore the static, dynamic, and complex features you can extract from malware for analysis Master the machine learning algorithms useful for malware detection Survey the efficacy of machine learning techniques at detecting common Android malware categories The Android Malware Handbook’s team of expert authors will guide you through the Android threat landscape and prepare you for the next wave of malware to come.