Name2Pkg: Lightweight One-Class Android Malware Screening via Name-Package Correspondence Modeling
Abstract: Deep learning-based malware detection has been widely adopted in security-critical services. Most detection methods rely on internal features extracted from APK files or runtime behavior. However, extracting these features is computationally expensive. This limits their use in large-scale, early-stage screening. Malicious apps may exhibit weak correspondence between their user-facing app names and package names, providing a low-cost screening signal. We present Name2Pkg, a lightweight one-class classification method. It leverages only the app name and the package name. We formulate malware screening as a sequence anomaly detection problem. A character-level sequence-to-sequence model estimates the conditional likelihood of a package name given the app name. The length-normalized negative log-likelihood serves as the anomaly score. We train the model and calibrate the threshold using only benign data. Using a dataset of 67,129 real-world applications, Name2Pkg achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC) of 0.982 and malware recall of 0.885 at an achieved false-positive rate of 0.044 on held-out test data. It has a 3.57 MiB checkpoint and a CPU inference latency of 28.20 ms per sample. Name2Pkg provides an efficient and effective pre-filtering signal for large-scale security systems.