The Sound of Malware: A Memory Forensics Approach for Android Malware Analysis via Audio Signals

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 5 Jun 2026] The Sound of Malware: A Memory Forensics Approach for Android Malware Analysis via Audio Signals Silvia Lucia Sanna, Massimo Palozzi, Leonardo Regano, Riccardo Lazzeretti, Giorgio Giacinto Android malware analysis is currently facing increasing challenges in achieving robust classification and detecting stealth attacks. Modern threats employ advanced evasion strategies such as code obfuscation, dynamic loading, packing, and even steganographic manipulation of traditional static and dynamic features. These techniques reduce the effectiveness of signature-based systems and degrade the reliability of Machine Learning models that depend on explicit semantic indicators such as permissions, API calls, or control-flow structures. In this work, we propose \approachname, a memory forensics malware detection framework that shifts the analysis perspective from semantic program modeling to signal-based structural representation. Both static bytecode and early-execution memory snapshots are transformed into audio waveforms through direct binary-to-waveform mapping, preserving low-level structural patterns without requiring disassembly or feature engineering. The resulting signals are processed using handcrafted spectral descriptors, Convolutional Neural Networks, and transformer-based embeddings. Experiments on CICMalDroid2020 dataset and VirusTotal malware demonstrate that \approachname achieves up to 98.0\% accuracy, outperforming static sonification and competitive state-of-the-art approaches. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2606.07005 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.07005v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.07005 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Silvia Lucia Sanna [view email] [v1] Fri, 5 Jun 2026 07:50:39 UTC (3,084 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)