**6. Conclusions**

The continuous development and fast change of the smart devices market has promoted an increase in the number of services and applications offered. As these devices integrate to the users every day activities, they become very attractive targets for cyber criminals. In this sense, malicious software (malware) has become a main security issue in this area. Although malware is not a new problem in the IT industry, differences between PC and smart devices make smart devices security a different problem bounded to the particular features of mobile devices. Moreover, the big number of stakeholders ranging from device manufactures to communication service providers creates a highly heterogeneous environment where attack surfaces characterization becomes a very complex task. In this context, this chapter aimed to present an overview of the fundamental aspects for Android malware analysis and detection.

As it can be deduced from the information discussed above, generally speaking there is a core set of analysis techniques and resource data that have been utilized in multiple research approaches in order to identify and detect malicious software. This observation may be obvious as the identified features are core elements of the Android security architecture, although there is not full agreement in the best technique or procedures for effective malware detection. It is important to notice that machine learning has an important role in most of the discussed approaches and in the state of the art for malware analysis, and in some cases, reported results look highly promising, but there is always the problem of having a limited number of samples to test all possible threats. Additionally, with the current vast set of analysis and reverse engineering set of tools, which are implemented under different technologies and analysis approaches, integration seems a very difficult task to achieve. Moreover, different tools provide multiple and different levels of automation. However, a need for automating most of the process is still an important issue as most of the analysis in the identification of new threats continues to be a human task.

Finally, it is expected that the information presented in this chapter would help readers to obtain a general view of the Android malware analysis and detection area from where she or he can visualize new avenues of research.
