Enhancing Android Malware Detection through Swarm Intelligence and Autoencoder Techniques Applied to API Call Analysis

Malware Security Intelligence involves analyzing applications and their metadata to identify potential security threats. Application Programming Interface (API) calls serve as a valuable source of information for detecting malware. Reducing the feature space in malware analysis enhances the efficiency of threat identification. This research seeks to identify the most significant API call features to enhance the precision of Android malware detection. Three swarm intelligence-based optimization techniques-Firefly Optimization, Cuckoo Search Optimization, and Ant Colony Optimization -are employed alongside Auto-Encoders to extract the most significant features. To evaluate these nature-inspired wrapper-based methods, popular machine learning classifiers, including K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN), Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), and Linear Regression (LR), are used. Furthermore, a hybrid artificial neural classifier is shown to improve the performance of malware categorization. Effectiveness of the suggested method is demonstrated by experimental results, which show an accuracy of 98.87% using only 7 out of 100 API call features.