Structural analysis and detection of android botnets using machine learning techniques

Nowadays, smartphone devices are an integral part of our lives since they enable us to access a large variety of services from personal to banking. The worldwide popularity and adoption of smartphone devices continue to approach the capabilities of traditional computing environments. The computer malware like botnets is becoming an emerging threat to users and network operators, especially on popular platform such as android. Due to the rapid growth of botnet applications, there is a pressing need to develop an effective solution to detect them. Most of the existing detection techniques can detect only malicious android applications, but it cannot detect android botnet applications. In this paper, we propose a structural analysis-based learning framework, which adopts machine learning techniques to classify botnets and benign applications using the botnet characteristics-related unique patterns of requested permissions and used features. The experimental evaluation based on real-world benchmark datasets shows that the selected patterns can achieve high detection accuracy with low false positive rate. The experimental and statistical tests show that the support vector machine classifier performs well compared to other classification algorithms.