BlockDroid: detection of Android malware from images using lightweight convolutional neural network models with ensemble learning and blockchain for mobile devices

Due to the increase in the volume and diversity of malware targeting Android systems, research on detecting this harmful software is steadily growing. Traditional malware detection studies require significant human intervention and resource consumption to analyze all malware files. Moreover, malware developers have developed polymorphism and code obfuscation techniques to evade traditional signature-based detection approaches used by antivirus companies. Consequently, traditional methods have become increasingly inadequate for malware detection. So far, many machine learning methods have been successfully applied to address the issue of malware detection. Recent efforts in this area have turned to deep learning methods. Because these methods can automatically extract meaningful features from data and efficiently learn complex relationships, they can achieve better performance in malware detection as well as in solving many other problems. This article presents BlockDroid, an approach that combines convolutional neural network (CNN) models, ensemble learning, and blockchain technology to increase the accuracy and efficiency of malware detection for mobile devices. By converting Android DEX files into image data, BlockDroid leverages the superior image analysis capabilities of CNN models to discern patterns indicative of malware. The CICMalDroid 2020 dataset, comprising 13,077 applications, was utilized to create a balanced dataset of 3,590 images, with an equal number of benign and malware instances. The proposed detection system was developed using lightweight models, including EfficientNetB0, MobileNetV2, and a custom model as CNN models. Experimental studies were conducted by applying both individual models and the proposed BlockDroid system to our dataset. The empirical results illustrate that BlockDroid surpasses the performance of the individual models, demonstrating a substantial accuracy rate of 97.38%. Uniquely, BlockDroid integrates blockchain technology to record the predictions made by the malware detection model, thereby eliminating the need for re-analysis of previously evaluated applications and ensuring more efficient resource utilization. Our approach offers a promising and innovative strategy for effective and efficient Android malware detection.