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An Empirical Evaluation of Software Obfuscation Techniques Applied to Android APKs

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International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2014)

Abstract

We investigate the problem of creating complex software obfuscation for mobile applications. We construct complex software obfuscation from sequentially applying simple software obfuscation methods. We define several desirable and undesirable properties of such transformations, including idempotency and monotonicity. We empirically evaluate a set of 7 obfuscation methods on 240 Android Packages (APKs). We show that many obfuscation methods are idempotent or monotonous.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although we rely heavily on Pandora, please note that our framework does not implement any obfuscation methods or metrics itself and can be extended with other obfuscation tools (such as Sandmark) later. It therefore is rather a “meta framework”.

  2. 2.

    In the following figures, we have scaled down the graphs to improve the visual “overview” impression with multiple graphs on one page. The caption repeats the method and metric for readability.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Tilo Müller for his comments on a prior version of this paper. This work was partly supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre “Invasive Computing” (SFB/TR 89), the “Bavarian State Ministry of Education, Science and the Arts” as part of the FORSEC research association, and by a scholarship of the Chinese State Scholarship Fund.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Erlangen, Germany

    Felix C. Freiling, Mykola Protsenko & Yan Zhuang

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  1. Felix C. Freiling
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  2. Mykola Protsenko
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  3. Yan Zhuang
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Correspondence to Yan Zhuang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. CAS, Institute of Information Engineering, Beijing, China

    Jin Tian

  2. Institute of Information Engineering, Beijing, China

    Jiwu Jing

  3. IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York, New York, USA

    Mudhakar Srivatsa

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© 2015 Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Freiling, F.C., Protsenko, M., Zhuang, Y. (2015). An Empirical Evaluation of Software Obfuscation Techniques Applied to Android APKs. In: Tian, J., Jing, J., Srivatsa, M. (eds) International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2014. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 153. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23802-9_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23802-9_24

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-23801-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-23802-9

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