Malware and Piracy Detection in Android Applications

With the exploding growth in the number of Android applications, software malware and piracy incidents are among the major concerns to be addressed for a healthy marketplace. In this work, a permission-based malware detection system is developed to identify malware infected applications using the permissions accessed by applications. We also re-implement Juxtapp for malware and piracy detection based on the underlying opcodes. The performance of these approaches is evaluated on a large dataset containing original, pirated and malware infected applications extracted from AndroZoo and KuafuDet. Experimental results demonstrate that the permission-based malware detection system generally performs better than the opcode-based approach. In addition, Juxtapp can be used to detect software piracy, and may be used in conjunction with a permission-based malware detection system to accurately identify malware infected and pirated applications.