Special Issue Article Open Access

Malevolent Transition Revealing in Android Platform

Abstract

Mobile malware threats (e.g., on Android) have recently become a real concern. In this paper, we evaluate the state-of-the-art commercial mobile anti-malware products for Android and test how resistant they are against various common obfuscation techniques (even with known malware). Such an evaluation is important for not only measuring the available defense against mobile malware threats but also proposing effec- tive, next-generation solutions. We developed CarbonRom, a systematic framework with various transformation techniques, and used it for our study. Our results on ten popular commercial anti-malware applications for Android are worrisome: none of these tools is resistant against common malware transformation techniques. Moreover, a majority of them can be trivially defeated by applying slight transformation over known malware with little effort for malware authors. Finally, in the light of our results, we propose possible remedies for improving the current state of malware detection on mobile devices.

Y. Vishnu Priya, V. Gokul Rajan

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