Effective android malware detection with a hybrid model based on deep autoencoder and convolutional neural network

Android security incidents occurred frequently in recent years. To improve the accuracy and efficiency of large-scale Android malware detection, in this work, we propose a hybrid model based on deep autoencoder (DAE) and convolutional neural network (CNN). First, to improve the accuracy of malware detection, we reconstruct the high-dimensional features of Android applications (apps) and employ multiple CNN to detect Android malware. In the serial convolutional neural network architecture (CNN-S), we use Relu, a non-linear function, as the activation function to increase sparseness and “dropout” to prevent over-fitting. The convolutional layer and pooling layer are combined with the full-connection layer to enhance feature extraction capability. Under these conditions, CNN-S shows powerful ability in feature extraction and malware detection. Second, to reduce the training time, we use deep autoencoder as a pre-training method of CNN. With the combination, deep autoencoder and CNN model (DAE-CNN) can learn more flexible patterns in a short time. We conduct experiments on 10,000 benign apps and 13,000 malicious apps. CNN-S demonstrates a significant improvement compared with traditional machine learning methods in Android malware detection. In details, compared with SVM, the accuracy with the CNN-S model is improved by 5%, while the training time using DAE-CNN model is reduced by 83% compared with CNN-S model.