Abstract
Android malware attacks are increasing daily at a tremendous volume,
making Android users more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Researchers have
developed many machine learning (ML)/ deep learning (DL) techniques to
detect and mitigate android malware attacks. However, due to
technological advancement, there is a rise in android mobile devices.
Furthermore, the devices are geographically dispersed, resulting in
distributed data. In such scenario, traditional ML/DL techniques are
infeasible since all of these approaches require the data to be kept in
a central system; this may provide a problem for user privacy because of
the massive proliferation of Android mobile devices; putting the data in
a central system creates an overhead. Also, the traditional ML/DL-based
android malware classification techniques are not scalable. Researchers
have proposed federated learning (FL) based android malware
classification system to solve the privacy preservation and scalability
with high classification performance. In traditional FL, Federated
Averaging (FedAvg) is utilized to construct the global model at each
round by merging all of the local models obtained from all of the
customers that participated in the FL. However, the conventional FedAvg
has a disadvantage: if one poor-performing local model is included in
global model development for each round, it may result in an
under-performing global model. Because FedAvg favors all local models
equally when averaging. To address this issue, our main objective in
this work is to design a dynamic weighted federated averaging
(DW-FedAvg) strategy in which the weights for each local model are
automatically updated based on their performance at the client. The
DW-FedAvg is evaluated using four popular benchmark datasets, Melgenome,
Drebin, Kronodroid and Tuandromd used in android malware classification
research. The results show that our proposed approach is scalable,
privacy preserved, and capable of outperforming the traditional FedAvg
for android malware classification in terms of accuracy, F1 score, AUC
score and FPR score.