Unraveling the Key of Machine Learning Solutions for Android Malware
  Detection
Jiahao Liu Jun Zeng Fabio Pierazzi Lorenzo Cavallaro Zhenkai Liang
Android malware detection serves as the front line against malicious apps.
With the rapid advancement of machine learning (ML), ML-based Android malware
detection has attracted increasing attention due to its capability of
automatically capturing malicious patterns from Android APKs. These
learning-driven methods have reported promising results in detecting malware.
However, the absence of an in-depth analysis of current research progress makes
it difficult to gain a holistic picture of the state of the art in this area.
  This paper presents a comprehensive investigation to date into ML-based
Android malware detection with empirical and quantitative analysis. We first
survey the literature, categorizing contributions into a taxonomy based on the
Android feature engineering and ML modeling pipeline. Then, we design a
general-propose framework for ML-based Android malware detection, re-implement
12 representative approaches from different research communities, and evaluate
them from three primary dimensions, i.e., effectiveness, robustness, and
efficiency. The evaluation reveals that ML-based approaches still face open
challenges and provides insightful findings like more powerful ML models are
not the silver bullet for designing better malware detectors. We further
summarize our findings and put forth recommendations to guide future research.