Security News > 2021 > June > DroidMorph Shows Popular Android Antivirus Fail to Detect Cloned Malicious Apps
A new research published by a group of academics has found that anti-virus programs for Android continue to remain vulnerable against different permutations of malware, in what could pose a serious risk as malicious actors evolve their toolsets to better evade analysis.
Unlike iOS, apps can be downloaded from third-party sources on Android devices, raising the possibility that unwitting users can install unverified and lookalike apps that clone a legitimate app's functionality but are built to trick targets into downloading apps laced with fraudulent code that are capable of stealing sensitive information.
To test and evaluate the resilience of commercially available anti-malware products against this attack, the researchers developed a tool called DroidMorph, which allows Android applications to be "Morphed" by decompiling the files to an intermediate form that's then modified and compiled to create clones, both benign and malware.
Morphing could be at different levels, the researchers noted, such as those that involve changing the class and method names in the source code or something non-trivial that could alter the execution flow of the program, including the call graph and the control-flow graph.
In a test conducted using 1,771 morphed APK variants generated through DroidMorph, the researchers found that 8 out of 17 leading commercial anti-malware programs failed to detect any of the cloned applications, with an average detection rate of 51.4% for class morphing, 58.8% for method morphing, and 54.1% for body morphing observed across all programs.
As future work, the researchers outlined that they intend to add more obfuscations at different levels as well as enable morphing of metadata information such as permissions that are embedded in an APK file with an aim to bring down the detection rates.
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