Catch Me If You Can Evaluating Android Anti-Malware Against Transformation Attacks

Abstract

Mobile malware threats (e.g., on Android) have recently become a real concern. In this paper, we evaluate the state-of-the-art commercial mobile anti-malware products for Android and test how resistant they are against various common obfuscation techniques (even with known malware). Such an evaluation is important for not only measuring the available defense against mobile malware threats, but also proposing effective, next-generation solutions. We developed DroidChameleon, a systematic framework with various transformation techniques, and used it for our study. Our results on 10 popular commercial anti-malware applications for Android are worrisome: none of these tools is resistant against common malware transformation techniques. In addition, a majority of them can be trivially defeated by applying slight transformation over known malware with little effort for malware authors. Finally, in light of our results, we propose possible remedies for improving the current state of malware detection on mobile devices.

Existing System

Existing anti-malware software, studied the robustness of anti-malware against Android malware recently using a tool called ADAM. ADAM implements only a few transformations, renaming methods, introducing junk methods, code reordering, and string encoding, in addition to repacking and assembling/disassembling.

Proposed System

In this paper, we aim to evaluate the efficacy of anti-malware tools on Android in the face of various evasion techniques. For example, polymorphism is used to evade detection tools by transforming a malware in different forms (“morphs”) but with the same code. Metamorphism is another common technique that can mutate code so that it no longer remains the same but still has the same behaviour. For ease of presentation, we use the term polymorphism in this paper to represent both obfuscation techniques. In addition, we use the term ‘transformation’ broadly, to refer to various polymorphic or metamorphic changes.

Architecture