arXiv Machine Learning

ShielDroid: A Hybrid Approach Integrating Machine and Deep Learning for Android Malware Detection

arXiv:2608. 03250v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of modern technology has led to a significant increase in the use of smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets, resulting in the widespread adoption of mobile applications.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

REPLICANT: Learning Policies for Evading and Hardening Malware Detectors

The paper introduces Replicant, a deep reinforcement learning framework that learns to evade malware detectors under a strict label‑only black‑box threat model. Replicant generates reusable policies for modifying malware samples and deciding when to query the target, and it transfers across different samples, detectors, and feature spaces. In experiments on seven Android malware detectors and three feature spaces, Replicant achieves a mean attack success rate of 78.8%, outperforming state‑of‑the‑art methods by 20.9%–39.2% and providing a stronger signal for adversarial training to harden detectors.

By Shae McFadden, Ilias Tsingenopoulos, Mario D'Onghia, Alexander Herzog, Myles Foley, Chris Hicks, Lorenzo Cavallaro, Fabio Pierazzi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Classifier-Dependent Benefits of Pseudo-Labeling for Semi-Supervised Android Malware Attribution

The study evaluates pseudo‑labeling for semi‑supervised learning on Android malware attribution using six classifiers. Results show that the benefit of SSL varies strongly by classifier: SVM gains the most, LightGBM improves modestly, and Random Forest can be harmed at low label ratios. The approach particularly helps hard‑to‑classify families and achieves near‑optimal performance with about 800 labeled samples.

By Md Rafid Islam, Zahid Hasan, Hafiz Abdur Rahman
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Evaluating Out-of-Distribution Robustness in Graph-Based Android Malware Classification: A New Principled Benchmark

The paper introduces a new benchmark for assessing out-of-distribution robustness in graph-based Android malware classifiers, highlighting that current models drop up to 45% accuracy on unseen malware variants. It presents two scenarios—MalNet-Tiny-Common for covariate shift and MalNet-Tiny-Distinct for domain shift—and identifies a limitation in existing benchmarks that rely solely on structure-only function call graphs. To address this, the authors propose a semantic enrichment framework that augments graph topology with function-level attributes and LLM-based code embeddings, demonstrating that this data-centric approach improves robustness under distribution shift and complements model-based methods.

By Ngoc N. Tran, Anwar Said, Waseem Abbas, Tyler Derr, Xenofon D. Koutsoukos
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Enhancing Multiclass Malware Classification in Resource-Constrained Environments

The paper presents a lightweight machine‑learning approach for multi‑class malware detection on resource‑constrained devices. Using a LightGBM classifier with SMOTE oversampling, SOM‑US undersampling, and Genetic‑Algorithm feature selection, the authors achieve 89.1 % accuracy on four malware families and 76 % on 16 individual malware types. A second Random‑Forest model further improves family classification to 91.2 % and individual classification to 78.7 %.

By Abdul Khalek Alve, Alif Rahman, Saadman Zaman, Sazzad Hossen Himel, Muhammad Iqbal Hossain