Outsmarting Android Malware with Cutting-Edge Feature Engineering and Machine Learning Techniques

The growing usage of Android smartphones has led to a significant rise in incidents of Android malware andprivacy breaches.This escalating security concern necessitates the development of advanced technologies capableof automatically detecting andmitigatingmalicious activities in Android applications(apps).Such technologies arecrucial for safeguarding user data and maintaining the integrity of mobile devices in an increasingly digital world.Current methods employed to detect sensitive data leaks in Android apps are hampered by two major limitationsthey require substantial computational resources and are prone to a high frequency of false positives.This meansthat while attempting to identify security breaches,these methods often consume considerable processing powerand mistakenly flag benign activities as malicious,leading to inefficiencies and reduced reliability in malwaredetection.The proposed approach includes a data preprocessing step that removes duplicate samples,managesunbalanced datasets,corrects inconsistencies,and imputes missing values to ensure data accuracy.The Minimaxmethod is then used to normalize numerical data,followed by feature vector extraction using the Gain ratio andChi-squared test to identify and extract the most significant characteristics using an appropriate prediction model.This study focuses on extracting a subset of attributes best suited for the task and recommending a predictivemodel based on domain expert opinion.The proposed method is evaluated using Drebin and TUANDROMDdatasets containing 15,036 and 4,464 benign and malicious samples,respectively.The empirical result shows thatthe RandomForest(RF)and Support VectorMachine(SVC)classifiers achieved impressive accuracy rates of 98.9%and 98.8%,respectively,in detecting unknown Androidmalware.A sensitivity analysis experiment was also carriedout on all three ML-based classifiers based on MAE,MSE,R2,and sensitivity parameters,resulting in a flawlessperformance for both datasets.This approach has substantial potential for real-world applications and can serve asa valuable tool for preventing the spread of Androidmalware and enhancing mobile device security.