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Detecting Repackaged Android Applications

Torki Harchegani, Mehran | 2020

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 53512 (19)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Computer Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Amini, Morteza
  7. Abstract:
  8. Developing an android application from scratch is a time-consuming and expensive process, but modifying an existing and similar application is much easier. Modifying an android application, which is called repackaging, is done for different purposes. Cracking non-free android applications, modifying advertising libraries code, adding malicious payload to benign ones and redistributing known malwares are some of the important purposes. Existing methods for confronting android application repackaging can be divided into three categories: 1) based on comparing with the original application, 2) based on changing the original application, 3) based on changing the android platform. Methods in the second and third categories have preventive nature and they are not applicable in the current android ecosystem. Methods of the first category which are focusing on repackaging detection, resilience to obfuscation techniques and detecting library codes are the two important and fundamental challenges. In the proposed method of this research, at first, an android application code is disassembled and analyzed using Soot framework. After that, by extracting and combining the features, which are resilient to obfuscation techniques, a signature is generated for each class in the android application, which encompasses information about the other methods and classes used directly or indirectly. After detecting and deleting library codes by comparing the application's classes signature with the library's classes signature in the repository, the similarity of each two input applications are evaluated by comparing their remaining classes signature for detecting the repackaged applications. By evaluating the proposed method on 157 android applications, 319 libraries and 722 application pairs, we enhanced the state-of-the-art method, regarding speed and precision. More precisely, precision in library detection is increased from 74% to 97% and from 89% to 98% in repackaging detection
  9. Keywords:
  10. Android Applications ; Similar Applications ; Android Operating System ; Android Application Repackaging ; Android Libraries

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