• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.39B no.5
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• pp.309-316
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• 2014

It is easy to reverse engineer an Android app package file(APK) and get its decompiled source code. Therefore, attackers obtains economic benefits by illegally using the decompiled source code, or modifies an app by inserting malware. To address these problems in Android, we propose an APK overwrite scheme that protects apps against illegal modification of themselves by using a new anti-reverse engineering technique. In this paper, the targets are the apps which have been written by any programmer. For a target app (original app), server system (1) makes a copy of a target app, (2) encrypts the target app, (3) creates a stub app by replacing the DEX (Dalvik Executable) of the copied version with our stub DEX, and then (4) distributes the stub app as well as the encrypted target app to users of smartphones. The users downloads both the encrypted target app and the corresponding stub app. Whenever the stub app is executed on smartphones, the stub app and our launcher app decrypt the encrypted target app, overwrite the stub app with the decrypted target one, and executes the decrypted one. Every time the target app ends its execution, the decrypted app is deleted. To verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme, experimentation with several popular apps are carried out. The results of the experiment demonstrate that our scheme is effective for preventing reverse engineering and tampering of Android apps.