Android Cloud Antivirus Based on Static Analysis

Abstract

Smart Phones are quickly becoming necessities for many people. Smartphones are now used for more than just making and receiving phone calls. They can manage social networks, send emails, send money online, do online shopping, book tickets online, watch videos, do research, and a lot of other services. Unfortunately, they also serve as prime locations for malware to be spread by hackers. Because data movement has increased in our modern time, security is crucial. Running computationally demanding antivirus algorithms on smartphones is hard because they require too much storage, processing, and communication overhead. We developed an Android antivirus application that used static analysis to detect if any application contains malware. The antivirus uses a TF-IDF feature extractor and extra trees classifier. We conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, antivirus is downloaded on Android devices and execution of the antivirus is entirely on the Android devices. In the second experiment, we run the malware detection process on a server to achieve the cloud computing concept. Cloud Computing is using a remote server network rather than a local server or a personal smartphone to store, manage, and process data. We compare detection time in each experiment. The results show that using cloud computing saves time and overhead. Cloud antivirus is a fast and lite way to scan an Android application.