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Deobfuscating third party libraries in Android applications using library detection tools

Hoekstra, Æ. S. (2021) Deobfuscating third party libraries in Android applications using library detection tools.

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Abstract:Nowadays there is a mobile application for almost everything. Adversaries can create malicious applications and hide their intent by obfuscating them. Obfuscation makes applications hard to analyse. In this research we focus on deobfuscating third party libraries in Android applications. More specifically, we show how off-the-shelf library detection tools intended for identifying third party libraries, can be used to deobfuscate those libraries. We achieve this by modifying and extending the output of those tools such that the result can be applied as a valid deobfuscating transformation on Android apps. We compare this method against DeGuard, an existing deobfuscation method based on a statistical model. We create a novel data set of Android applications and third party libraries and use it to evaluate both approaches. We find that our method predicts fewer identifiers than the existing method. However, our approach is less computationally expensive and has a higher accuracy. This research focuses on tackling identifier obfuscation. Future research is needed to adapt and evaluate the developed method on more thorough obfuscation types such as class repackaging.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:EEMCS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Subject:54 computer science
Programme:Computer Science MSc (60300)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/86069
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