Intelligent Android Malware Detection Using Radial Basis Function Networks and Permission Features

Recently, the quick development rate of apps in the Android platform has led to an accelerated increment in creating malware applications by cyber attackers. Numerous Android malware detection tools have utilized conventional signature-based approaches to detect malware apps. However, these conventional strategies can't identify the latest apps on whether applications are malware or not. Many new malware apps are periodically discovered but not all malware Apps can be accurately detected. Hence, there is a need to propose intelligent approaches that are able to detect the newly developed Android malware applications. In this study, Radial Basis Function (RBF) networks are trained using known Android applications and then used to detect the latest and new Android malware applications. Initially, the optimal permission features of Android apps are selected using Information Gain Ratio (IGR). Appropriately, the features selected by IGR are utilized to train the RBF networks in order to detect effectively the new Android malware apps. The empirical results showed that RBF achieved the best detection accuracy (97.20%) among other common machine learning techniques. Furthermore, RBF accomplished the best detection results in most of the other measures.