A Critical Analysis on Android Vulnerabilities, Malware, Anti-malware and Anti-malware Bypassing

Abstract

Android has become the dominant operating system for portable devices, making it a valuable asset that needs protection. Though Android is very popular; it has several vulnerabilities which attackers use for malicious intents. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on the threats in Android OS that various malware developers exploit and the different malware functionality based on Android’s threats. Furthermore, we analyze and evaluate the anti-malware approaches implemented to face the malware functionalities. Finally, we analyze and categorize malware developers’ most common anti-analysis techniques to evade anti-malware approaches. It comes to our attention that many papers covered each topic separately; however, we could not find one comprehensive study that covers Android with such details that it could be used as a research handbook on Android malware. This is the main novelty and contribution of this work.