Abstract
Since the development of information systems during the last decade, cybersecurity has become a critical concern for many groups, organizations, and institutions. Malware applications are among the commonly used tools and tactics for perpetrating a cyberattack on Android devices, and it is becoming a challenging task to develop novel ways of identifying them. There are various malware detection models available to strengthen the Android operating system against such attacks. These malware detectors categorize the target applications based on the patterns that exist in the features present in the Android applications. As the analytics data continue to grow, they negatively affect the Android defense mechanisms. Since large numbers of unwanted features create a performance bottleneck for the detection mechanism, feature selection techniques are found to be beneficial. This work presents a Rock Hyrax Swarm Optimization with deep learning-based Android malware detection (RHSODL-AMD) model. The technique presented includes finding the Application Programming Interfaces (API) calls and the most significant permissions, which results in effective discrimination between the good ware and malware applications. Therefore, an RHSO based feature subset selection (RHSO-FS) technique is derived to improve the classification results. In addition, the Adamax optimizer with attention recurrent autoencoder (ARAE) model is employed for Android malware detection. The experimental validation of the RHSODL-AMD technique on the Andro-AutoPsy dataset exhibits its promising performance, with a maximum accuracy of 99.05%.