Cypider: Building Community-based Cyber-defense Infrastructure for Android Malware Detection

The popularity of Android OS has dramatically increased malware apps targeting this mobile OS. The daily amount of malware has overwhelmed the detection process. This fact has motivated the need for developing malware detection and family attribution solutions with the least manual intervention. In response, we propose Cypider framework, a set of techniques and tools aiming to perform a systematic detection of mobile malware by building an efficient and scalable similarity network infrastructure of malicious apps. Our detection method is based on a novel concept, namely malicious community, in which we consider, for a given family, the instances that share common features. Under this concept, we assume that multiple similar Android apps with different authors are most likely to be malicious. Cypider leverages this assumption for the detection of variants of known malware families and zero-day malware. It is important to mention that Cypider does not rely on signature-based or learning-based patterns. Alternatively, it applies community detection algorithms on the similarity network, which extracts sub-graphs considered as suspicious and most likely malicious communities. Furthermore, we propose a novel fingerprinting technique, namely community fingerprint, based on a learning model for each malicious community. Cypider shows excellent results by detecting about 50% of the malware dataset in one detection iteration. Besides, the preliminary results of the community fingerprint are promising as we achieved 87% of the detection.