A Review of Free Cloud-Based Anti-Malware Apps for Android

• Published in: 2015 IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA Vol. 1; pp. 1053 - 1058
• Main Authors: Walls, Jason, Choo, Kim-Kwang Raymond
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.08.2015
• Subjects: Android anti-malware; Androids; cloud anti-malware apps; Cloud computing; Humanoid robots; Malware; Mobile communication; permissions model; Smart phones; threats
• DOI: 10.1109/Trustcom.2015.482

The traditional way of protecting a system against malicious threats and loss of personal data by using locally installed anti-malware software is unlikely to work on mobile devices due to the changing threat landscape and the mobile device resource limitations (e.g. storage and battery life). A number of anti-malware providers have migrated to the cloud where the computationally demanding tasks of analyzing malware is conducted by cloud-based server. However, the effectiveness of these anti-mobile apps has not been studied. Therefore, in this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of ten popular free cloud-based anti-malware apps using a known Android malware dataset. We hope that this research will contribute towards a better understanding of the effectiveness of Android cloud-based anti-malware apps.