Title
Android botnet detection using machine learning models based on a comprehensive static analysis approach
Abstract
Today, Android stands out amongst the most well-known and far reaching smartphones’ operating systems. It has millions of applications that are distributed at either accredited or informal stores. Botnet applications are classified as malwares that can be distributed by utilizing these stores and downloaded by the unfortunate users on their smartphones. This work investigates Android botnets using static analysis to extract possible features from the applications source code after being reverse engineered. The features are then used to develop effective machine learning models to detect such malicious applications. Additionally, the study proposes a new set of features related to accessing resources on the target mobile. The features are extracted from 1928 Android botnet applications (ISCX dataset) and 2224 of Android benign applications (downloaded and scanned by special tools developed as part of this work). The extracted features are categorized into six groups of features in addition to a group that contains all the extracted features. Each group of features undergoes training and testing processes using four popular ML classifiers (i.e. Random Forest, Multi-Layer Perceptron neural networks, Decision trees, and Naive Bayes). After comparing the results and performing features importance analysis, it can be noted that the URL set of features play the key role in the Android botnet detection problem and the Random Forest classifier obtains the best results based on all sets of features.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1016/j.jisa.2020.102735
Journal of Information Security and Applications
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Android botnet detection,Data mining,Android botnet features,Classification,Machine learning
Journal
58
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2214-2126
1
0.36
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wadi' Hijawi110.69
Ja'far Alqatawna221.39
Ala' M. Al-Zoubi32219.83
Mohammad A. Hassonah4733.64
Hossam Faris576138.48