Papers › HAWK: Rapid Android Malware Detection through Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks

HAWK: Rapid Android Malware Detection through Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks

17 Aug 2021arXiv:2108.07548links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Yiming Hei, Renyu Yang, Hao Peng, Lihong Wang, Xiaolin Xu, Jianwei Liu, Hong Liu, Jie Xu, Lichao Sun

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Android is undergoing unprecedented malicious threats daily, but the existing methods for malware detection often fail to cope with evolving camouflage in malware. To address this issue, we present HAWK, a new malware detection framework for evolutionary Android applications. We model Android entities and behavioural relationships as a heterogeneous information network (HIN), exploiting its rich semantic metastructures for specifying implicit higher-order relationships. An incremental learning model is created to handle the applications that manifest dynamically, without the need for re-constructing the whole HIN and the subsequent embedding model. The model can pinpoint rapidly the proximity between a new application and existing in-sample applications and aggregate their numerical embeddings under various semantics. Our experiments examine more than 80,860 malicious and 100,375 benign applications developed over a period of seven years, showing that HAWK achieves the highest detection accuracy against baselines and takes only 3.5ms on average to detect an out-of-sample application, with the accelerated training time of 50x faster than the existing approach.

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