VADER-RF: a novel scheme for protecting user privacy on android devices

Abstract

Android protects user privacy through its permission system and explains permission usage in privacy disclosure. Privacy disclosure often fails to predict app behavior accurately and leading to potential exploitation by malicious applications. To address this, we propose the VADER-RF technique, which combines VADER sentiment analysis with Random Forest machine learning to correlate privacy disclosures with app behavior. Our model analyzes privacy disclosure documents using sentiment analysis, extracting permissions from AndroidManifest.xml file, and explore the data flow analysis of Java files. These features were evaluated on Naive Bayes, SVM, Decision Tree and Random Forest machine learning models. The Random Forest model demonstrated superior performance with the highest accuracy (81.6%), precision (85.3%) and recall (89.4%). Kendall's Tau correlation coefficient is 0.54, which indicates that our model is moderate to strongly effective at predicting whether an app is malicious based on the selected features. Sentiment analysis significantly enhanced all models’ performance, underscoring the effectiveness of integrating sentiment analysis with traditional feature sets for advanced malware detection.