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Enhanced Android Malware Detection and Family Classification, using Conversation-level Network
Signature-based malware detection algorithms are facing challenges to cope with the massive number of threats in
the Android environment. In this paper, conversation-level network traffic features are extracted and used in a supervised-
based model. This model was used to enhance the process of Android malware detection, categorization, and family
classification. The model employs the ensemble learning technique in order to select the most useful features among the
extracted features. A real-world dataset called CICAndMal2017 was used in this paper. The results show that Extra-trees
classifier had achieved the highest weighted accuracy percentage among the other classifiers by 87.75%, 79.97%, and
66.71%for malware detection, malware categorization, and malware family classification respectively. A comparison with
another study that uses the same dataset was made. This study has achieved a significant enhancement in malware family
classification and malware categorization. For malware family classification, the enhancement was 39.71% for precision and
41.09% for recall. The rate of enhancement for the Android malware categorization was 30.2% and 31.14% for precision and
recall, respectively.
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