Open Access

ARTICLE

Detecting Android Botnet Applications Using Convolution Neural Network

Mamona Arshad¹, Ahmad Karim¹, Salman Naseer², Shafiq Ahmad³, Mejdal Alqahtani³, Akber Abid Gardezi⁴, Muhammad Shafiq^5,*, Jin-Ghoo Choi⁵

1 Department of Information Technology, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, 60000, Pakistan
2 Department of Information Technology, University of the Punjab Gujranwala Campus, Gujranwala, 52250, Pakistan
3 Industrial Engineering Department, College of Engineering, King Saud University, P.O. Box 800, Riyadh, 11421, Saudi Arabia
4 Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad, 45550, Pakistan
5 Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan, 38541, Korea

* Corresponding Author: Muhammad Shafiq. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2023, 77(2), 2123-2135. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2022.028680

Received 15 February 2022; Accepted 05 July 2022; Issue published 29 November 2023

Abstract

The exponential growth in the development of smartphones and handheld devices is permeated due to everyday activities i.e., games applications, entertainment, online banking, social network sites, etc., and also allow the end users to perform a variety of activities. Because of activities, mobile devices attract cybercriminals to initiate an attack over a diverse range of malicious activities such as theft of unauthorized information, phishing, spamming, Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS), and malware dissemination. Botnet applications are a type of harmful attack that can be used to launch malicious activities and has become a significant threat in the research area. A botnet is a collection of infected devices that are managed by a botmaster and communicate with each other via a command server in order to carry out malicious attacks. With the rise in malicious attacks, detecting botnet applications has become more challenging. Therefore, it is essential to investigate mobile botnet attacks to uncover the security issues in severe financial and ethical damages caused by a massive coordinated command server. Current state of the art, various solutions were provided for the detection of botnet applications, but in general, the researchers suffer various techniques of machine learning-based methods with static features which are usually ineffective when obfuscation techniques are used for the detection of botnet applications. In this paper, we propose an approach by exploring the concept of a deep learning-based method and present a well-defined Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model. Using the visualization approach, we obtain the colored images through byte code files of applications and perform an experiment. For analysis of the results of an experiment, we differentiate the performance of the model from other existing research studies. Furthermore, our method outperforms with 94.34% accuracy, 92.9% of precision, and 92% of recall.

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Keywords

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