Uncovering the Dilemmas on Antivirus Software Design in Modern Mobile Platforms

With the rapid increase in Android device popularity, a new evolving arms-race is happening between the malware writers and AntiVirus Detectors (AVDs) on the popular mobile system. In its latest comparison of AVDs, independent test lab AV-TEST reported that AVDs have around 95% malware recognition rate. However, as mobile systems are specially designed, we consider that the power of AVDs’ should also be evaluated based on their runtime malware detection capabilities. In this work, we performed a comprehensive study on ten popular Android AVDs to evaluate the effectiveness of their scanning operations. During our analysis, we identified the design dilemmas related to two types of malware scanning operations, namely local malware scan and cloud-based malware scan. Our work opens a new research direction in designing more effective and efficient malware scan mechanisms for current antivirus software on mobile devices.