  The vast majority of today's mobile malware targets Android devices. This has
pushed the research effort in Android malware analysis in the last years. An
important task of malware analysis is the classification of malware samples
into known families. Static malware analysis is known to fall short against
techniques that change static characteristics of the malware (e.g. code
obfuscation), while dynamic analysis has proven effective against such
techniques. To the best of our knowledge, the most notable work on Android
malware family classification purely based on dynamic analysis is DroidScribe.
With respect to DroidScribe, our approach is easier to reproduce. Our
methodology only employs publicly available tools, does not require any
modification to the emulated environment or Android OS, and can collect data
from physical devices. The latter is a key factor, since modern mobile malware
can detect the emulated environment and hide their malicious behavior. Our
approach relies on resource consumption metrics available from the proc file
system. Features are extracted through detrended fluctuation analysis and
correlation. Finally, a SVM is employed to classify malware into families. We
provide an experimental evaluation on malware samples from the Drebin dataset,
where we obtain a classification accuracy of 82%, proving that our methodology
achieves an accuracy comparable to that of DroidScribe. Furthermore, we make
the software we developed publicly available, to ease the reproducibility of
our results.
