Detecting android malware by using fuzzy set-based weighting method and firefly optimization algorithm

Android OS is open-source and easy to use mobile operating system. It is also user-friendly with many other features. In this way, it is a very preferred operating system on mobile phones. As a result, it becomes the target of malicious people. Applications installed on the Android operating system from the Google Play Store or by third-party application providers, also known as Android package files, may contain malicious software. So far, a variety of analyzes and detections have been made to detect such malware. While detecting malware, good results have been obtained with various methods, but malicious people have developed methods of hiding themselves against these methods. We propose a new feature selection method based on Firefly Optimization Algorithm with the Fuzzy Set-Based weighting method. The proposed method performs better than traditional feature selection methods with fewer features. The experimental results of this study proved that Firefly Optimization is an acceptable optimization algorithm for feature selection to detect malware in terms of classification performance and classification runtime. In addition, experimental evaluation of TF-IDF and Fuzzy Set-Based weighting methods indicates the effectiveness of the Fuzzy Set-Based weighting with a full feature set.