1 Detection of Mobile Malware in the Wild Mahinthan Chandramohan and Hee Beng Kuan Tan Block S2, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798. {mahintha001, ibktan}@ntu.edu.sg Abstract Smartphones have become an essential part of human life and its usage has grown exponentially in the past few years. The growth of smartphone usage can be directly linked to its ability to support third-party applications that are offered through online application markets. Due to its worldwide adoption and widespread popularity, the mobile malware attacks also growing at an alarming rate (http://bit.ly/sbtujI ). Malware authors make use of third-party applications to inject malicious content into smartphones and thus compromise phone‟s security. In response, mobile security research has become critical and focused on protecting smartphones from malware attacks and other security threats. In this paper, we present a survey of techniques that are used to detect mobile malware in the wild and discuss the limitations of current techniques and provide some tips to protect smartphones from potential security threats. Keywords Mobile security, Mobile malware detection, Smartphone protection, Survey 1. Introduction Smartphones (in this paper, the terms smartphone and mobile phone are used interchangeably) have become very popular worldwide and continuously growing in terms of features and computing power. According to Gartner in the second quarter of 2011, over 428 million mobile devices were sold worldwide, which accounts for 25% of the total mobile devices sold so far (http://bit.ly/ru8t30 ). IMS Research predicts that the annual smartphone sales will surpass one billion devices by the end of 2016 (http://bit.ly/qwDpiU ). Smartphones, being an ultra-portable easy to use device, enhance day-to-day tasks by providing the wealth of information from the internet and various functionalities such as easy credit card payments, video conferencing and voice recognition, through its applications. Smartphones have become an obvious target for malware attacks as people started to use them more than PCs, carrying them day and night, and most importantly using them for personal conversations and other confidential matters such as financial transactions, internet banking and for storing personal data. Users depend very much on their mobiles phones due to its feature rich applications and user friendliness. This made smartphones more vulnerable to malware attacks and become the targets for information and