Detecting Information Theft Based on Mobile Network Flows for Android Users

With the widespread use of smartphones, more and more malicious attacks happen with information leakage from apps installed on users' devices. The adversary always uses a malware as the client to take remote control of smartphones, and leverages the vulnerability of operation systems to send back the collected information without users' permissions. All the information has to be transferred by network traffic. In this paper, we consider that different apps maybe generate different network flows by different operations, and the "shapes" of the benign flows and malicious ones will be diverse. Thus we propose a detection model based on the analysis of relationships between behavior patterns and network flows, which achieves our goal by using the Random Forest machine learning algorithm to classify the network flows into benign or malicious. To further improve the controllability of the experiment, we design an app called Moledroid to simulate malwares by uploading the user's privacy without authorization, in addition, we can change the behavior pattern of the app to complete our evaluation. Finally, we run this app and several benign apps to generate traffic to detect the malicious network flows, and it shows that our detection model can achieve precision and accuracy higher than 95%, which demonstrates that our model is suitable for detecting the network flows of information theft.