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International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7 (4.15) (2018) 59-62
International Journal of Engineering & Technology
Website: www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJET
Research paper
A New Mobile Malware Classification for Audio Exploitation
Muhamad Nur Arif
1
, Azreena Abu Bakar
1
, Madihah Mohd Saudi
1,2
*
1
Faculty of Science and Technology, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM), Malaysia
2
CyberSecurity and Systems Research Unit, Islamic Science Institute (ISI), Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM), Malaysia
*Corresponding author E-mail: madihah@usim.edu.my
Abstract
Rapid growth and usage of Android smartphones worldwide have attracted many attackers to exploit them. Currently, the attackers used
mobile malware to attack victims’ smartphones to steal confidential information such as username and password. The attacks are also
motivated based on profit and money. The attacks come in different ways, such as via audio, image, GPS location, SMS and call logs in
the smartphones. Hence, this paper presents a new mobile malware classification for audio exploitation. This classification is beneficial
as an input or database to detect the mobile malware attacks. System calls and permissions for audio exploitation have been extracted by
using static and dynamic analyses using open source tools and freeware in a controlled lab environment. The testing was conducted by
using Drebin dataset as the training dataset and 500 anonymous apps from Google Play store as the testing dataset. The experiment re-
sults showed that 2% suspicious malicious apps matched with the proposed classification. The finding of this paper can be used as guid-
ance and reference for other researchers with the same interest.
Keywords: Audio Exploitation; Android Smartphone; Malicious Apps; Mobile Malware.
1. Introduction
With the proliferation of mobile devices, there is an increasing
threat from mobile malware such as worm, Trojan, spyware, ad-
ware, virus, spam and other malicious software. Exploited An-
droid devices by malware can be manipulated such as to retrieve
any crucial information like background process and services on
the device. Additionally, the device also can be used by the at-
tacker to record audio, send short messages service, make calls,
execute any malicious command and delete browser history [1].
There is 0.15% of devices infected with malware in 2014, and
some of them can steal bank account information via reviewing
emails in Gmail [2]. Furthermore, there is a Trojan that specializes
in accessing audio data and steal t he audio data without the user’s
knowledge [3]. The Trojan uses a sensitive sensor which is a con-
text sensitive reference to monitor the Audio Flinger. From that
audio service, the Trojan changes the media data from the kernel
service. This Trojan can block other application from accessing
audio data when the call is being used. After that, the controller is
alerted from the system when the sensitive call is made.
Therefore, the objective of this paper is to develop a new mobile
malware classification for audio exploitation based on system call
and permission. Based on the experiment conducted, there are 32
patterns of classification for the audio exploitation and 10 out of
500 mobile apps matched with the proposed classification. The
scope of this paper is on Android smart phone only. This is due to
the worldwide usage of Android with 86.1% in the market and
Android has become the most targeted smartphone by the attack-
ers in the world [4-5].
Malware can be referred as virus, worm, Trojan, botnet, adware
and spyware. There are many techniques such dynamic analysis or
static analysis to analyse the malware. For dynamic analysis, the
malware sample is executed in a controlled environment to see the
payload [6]. As for static analysis, the malware dataset is being
reverse engineered, and the source code is being analysed to see
the command and payload inside the source code [7]. Examples of
works that are related to malware analysis are research work by
[8-13]. Each of the static and dynamic analyses has it owns
strength, but under certain condition where the malwares payload
is hard to be analysed, both analyses need to be combined. This is
known as hybrid analysis where it combines static and dynamic
analyses, which has been used by [8, 14]. The strength of the hy-
brid analysis is both conditions can be monitored for optimum
result. Therefore, our paper has implemented this technique for the
experiment conducted.
The rest of this paper is written as follows. Section 2 presents the
methodology used in this paper. Section 2 presents the experi-
mental result and Section 4 concludes this paper and discusses the
future work.
2. Methodology
The overall experiment for malware analysis processes is summa-
rized in Figure 1. It is beneficial to extract the system call and
permission from the mobile apps.
There are two types of dataset which are training and testing.
Drebin dataset with a total of 5560 was used as the training dataset
to produce the pattern of the classification, while the testing da-
taset was taken from 500 anonymous mobile apps from Google
Play Store for evaluation. The experiment was conducted in a
controlled environment, where no outgoing network is allowed to
avoid malware spreads. 80% of the software used are open source,
which includes SDK tool for dynamic analysis, Genymotion for
android emulator, apk tool to decompile apk resource file into a
folder and strace to capture system call behaviour. During the
experiment, hybrid analysis that combines dynamic and static
analyses was conducted. There is no standard sequence to run
dynamic or static analysis. As for this experiment, the dynamic