Better Call Graphs: A New Dataset of Function Call Graphs for Malware Classification

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Main Authors: Hossain, Jakir, Singh, Gurvinder, Ziarek, Lukasz, Sarıyüce, Ahmet Erdem
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hossain, Jakir
Singh, Gurvinder
Ziarek, Lukasz
Sarıyüce, Ahmet Erdem
author_facet Hossain, Jakir
Singh, Gurvinder
Ziarek, Lukasz
Sarıyüce, Ahmet Erdem
contents Function call graphs (FCGs) have emerged as a powerful abstraction for malware detection, capturing the behavioral structure of applications beyond surface-level signatures. Their utility in traditional program analysis has been well established, enabling effective classification and analysis of malicious software. In the mobile domain, especially in the Android ecosystem, FCG-based malware classification is particularly critical due to the platform's widespread adoption and the complex, component-based structure of Android apps. However, progress in this direction is hindered by the lack of large-scale, high-quality Android-specific FCG datasets. Existing datasets are often outdated, dominated by small or redundant graphs resulting from app repackaging, and fail to reflect the diversity of real-world malware. These limitations lead to overfitting and unreliable evaluation of graph-based classification methods. To address this gap, we introduce Better Call Graphs (BCG), a comprehensive dataset of large and unique FCGs extracted from recent Android application packages (APKs). BCG includes both benign and malicious samples spanning various families and types, along with graph-level features for each APK. Through extensive experiments using baseline classifiers, we demonstrate the necessity and value of BCG compared to existing datasets. BCG is publicly available at https://erdemub.github.io/BCG-dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_20872
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Better Call Graphs: A New Dataset of Function Call Graphs for Malware Classification
Hossain, Jakir
Singh, Gurvinder
Ziarek, Lukasz
Sarıyüce, Ahmet Erdem
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Function call graphs (FCGs) have emerged as a powerful abstraction for malware detection, capturing the behavioral structure of applications beyond surface-level signatures. Their utility in traditional program analysis has been well established, enabling effective classification and analysis of malicious software. In the mobile domain, especially in the Android ecosystem, FCG-based malware classification is particularly critical due to the platform's widespread adoption and the complex, component-based structure of Android apps. However, progress in this direction is hindered by the lack of large-scale, high-quality Android-specific FCG datasets. Existing datasets are often outdated, dominated by small or redundant graphs resulting from app repackaging, and fail to reflect the diversity of real-world malware. These limitations lead to overfitting and unreliable evaluation of graph-based classification methods. To address this gap, we introduce Better Call Graphs (BCG), a comprehensive dataset of large and unique FCGs extracted from recent Android application packages (APKs). BCG includes both benign and malicious samples spanning various families and types, along with graph-level features for each APK. Through extensive experiments using baseline classifiers, we demonstrate the necessity and value of BCG compared to existing datasets. BCG is publicly available at https://erdemub.github.io/BCG-dataset.
title Better Call Graphs: A New Dataset of Function Call Graphs for Malware Classification
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20872