Is Malware Detection Needed for Android TV?

The smart TV ecosystem is rapidly expanding, allowing developers to publish their applications on TV markets to provide a wide array of services to TV users. However, this open nature can lead to significant cybersecurity concerns by bringing unauthorized access to home networks or leaking sensitive information. In this study, we focus on the security of Android TVs by developing a lightweight malware detection model specifically for these devices. We collected various Android TV applications from different markets and injected malicious payloads into benign applications to create Android TV malware, which is challenging to find on the market. We proposed a machine learning approach to detecting malware and evaluated our model. We compared the performance of nine classifiers and optimized the hyperparameters. Our findings indicated that the model performed well in rare malware cases on Android TVs. The most successful model classified malware with an F1-Score of 0.9789 in 0.1346 milliseconds per application.