FAST COMMUNITY STRUCTURE ANALYSIS OF CALL GRAPHS FOR MALWARE DETECTION

The use of graph-structured data in applications is increasing day by day. In order to infer useful information from such data, fast analytics and software tools are required. One of the graph analytics techniques used is community detection. Community detection is the technique of finding structural communities within a graph. Such communities are defined as groups which have highly connected nodes and have similarities with each other.

This research proposes a parallel heuristic for faster community detection using the parallel version of the Louvain algorithm: Grappolo. The Louvain algorithm is a hierarchical algorithm that focuses on modularity optimization. It gained popularity because of its ability to detect high-quality communities faster than the other existing community detection algorithms. However, the Louvain algorithm is a sequential algorithm. To reduce the execution time of the Louvain algorithm, a parallel version named Grappolo exists in the literature. This algorithm proposes parallel heuristics that address the challenges that occur due to parallelizing the sequential Louvain algorithm.

In this study, the researcher is investigating if Grappolo can be further parallelized to further reduce the execution time maintaining the quality of communities detected. To evaluate the proposed heuristic, it was tested on an OpenMP multithreaded environment. It was implemented on source codes of Android malware applications. However, as compared to Grapplolo, the proposed modified version resulted in higher execution times for the inputs tested. The modularity of the communities detected was similar to the Grappolo implementation.