A Comparison of Android Reverse Engineering Tools via Program Behaviors Validation Based on Intermediate Languages Transformation

Arnatovich, Yauhen Leanidavich; Wang, Lipo; Ngo, Ngoc Minh; Soh, Chee Kiong

doi:10.1109/access.2018.2808340

Cited by 32 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…While Zhou et al (2018) used the RE technique to detect logging classes and to remove logging calls and unnecessary instructions. Also, Arnatovich et al (2018) used RE to perform program analysis on a textual form of the executable source and to represent it with an intermediate language (IL). This IL has been introduced to represent applications executable Dalvik (dex) bytecode in a human-readable form.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reverse engineering approach for improving the quality of mobile applications

Elsayed

ElDahshan

El-Sharawy

et al. 2019

PeerJ Computer Science

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BackgroundPortable-devices applications (Android applications) are becoming complex software systems that must be developed quickly and continuously evolved to fit new user requirements and execution contexts. Applications must be produced rapidly and advance persistently in order to fit new client requirements and execution settings. However, catering to these imperatives may bring about poor outline decisions on design choices, known as anti-patterns, which may possibly corrupt programming quality and execution. Thus, the automatic detection of anti-patterns is a vital process that facilitates both maintenance and evolution tasks. Additionally, it guides developers to refactor their applications and consequently enhance their quality.MethodsWe proposed a general method to detect mobile applications’ anti-patterns that can detect both semantic and structural design anti-patterns. The proposed method is via reverse-engineering and ontology by using a UML modeling environment, an OWL ontology-based platform and ontology-driven conceptual modeling. We present and test a new method that generates the OWL ontology of mobile applications and analyzes the relationships among object-oriented anti-patterns and offer methods to resolve the anti-patterns by detecting and treating 15 different design’s semantic and structural anti-patterns that occurred in analyzing of 29 mobile applications. We choose 29 mobile applications randomly. Selecting a browser is not a criterion in this method because the proposed method is applied on a design level. We demonstrate a semantic integration method to reduce the incidence of anti-patterns using the ontology merging on mobile applications.ResultsThe proposed method detected 15 semantic and structural design anti-patterns which have appeared 1,262 times in a random sample of 29 mobile applications. The proposed method introduced a new classification of the anti-patterns divided into four groups. “The anti-patterns in the class group” is the most group that has the maximum occurrences of anti-patterns and “The anti-patterns in the operation group” is the smallest one that has the minimum occurrences of the anti-patterns which are detected by the proposed method. The results also showed the correlation between the selected tools which we used as Modelio, the Protégé platform, and the OLED editor of the OntoUML. The results showed that there was a high positive relation between Modelio and Protégé which implies that the combination between both increases the accuracy level of the detection of anti-patterns. In the evaluation and analyzing the suitable integration method, we applied the different methods on homogeneous mobile applications and found that using ontology increased the detection percentage approximately by 11.3% in addition to guaranteed consistency.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reverse engineering approach for improving the quality of mobile applications

Elsayed

ElDahshan

El-Sharawy

et al. 2019

PeerJ Computer Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…After downloading the apps, they need to be analyzed. In order to do that, APK reverse engineering process is required to decompile, rebuild, and convert the Android executable code (.apk file) into an intermediate language such as Smali, Jimple, and Jasmin [33]. The aim of reverse engineering is to retrieve the source file from the executable files in order to apply program analysis.…”

Section: Source Code Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Three of the most popular tools that have been used in Android APK reverse engineering are Apktool, Dex2jar, and Soot. A comparison of Android reverse engineering tools was conducted in [33]. The results showed that Apktool which uses Smali reassembled 97% of the original code, whereas Soot which uses Jimple and Dex2jar which uses Jasmin preserve 73% and 69% of the app's original code, respectively.…”

Section: Source Code Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Android Application Security Scanning Process

Almomani¹,

Alenezi²

2019

Telecommunication Systems - Principles and Applications of Wireless-Optical Technologies

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This chapter presents the security scanning process for Android applications. The aim is to guide researchers and developers to the core phases/steps required to analyze Android applications, check their trustworthiness, and protect Android users and their devices from being victims to different malware attacks. The scanning process is comprehensive, explaining the main phases and how they are conducted including (a) the download of the apps themselves; (b) Android application package (APK) reverse engineering; (c) app feature extraction, considering both static and dynamic analysis; (d) dataset creation and/or utilization; and (e) data analysis and data mining that result in producing detection systems, classification systems, and ranking systems. Furthermore, this chapter highlights the app features, evaluation metrics, mechanisms and tools, and datasets that are frequently used during the app's security scanning process.

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“… Verification and validation of APK files proved that the code behavior after applying the replacement algorithm is equivalent to the behavior required from the original code. The Android applications that are reassembling their files and folders using APKTool is more than preserves its original behavior as has been proven [30].…”

Section: Mysmali Compilermentioning

confidence: 99%

Design an Optimized Compiler to Enhance Performance of Android Applications

Dahdouh¹,

Ayman²,

Khawatmi³

et al. 2019

IJCA

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This paper presents a detailed study of the mechanism to design a compiler of Smali language to generate optimized Android applications. Smali language; which includes the dex bytecode; is the assembly language under Android OS, it is generated from the Java source code. The phases of designing the target compiler are described and the structure of files that are the input and output of the compiler are explained.

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A Comparison of Android Reverse Engineering Tools via Program Behaviors Validation Based on Intermediate Languages Transformation

Cited by 32 publications

References 28 publications

Reverse engineering approach for improving the quality of mobile applications

Reverse engineering approach for improving the quality of mobile applications

Android Application Security Scanning Process

Design an Optimized Compiler to Enhance Performance of Android Applications

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