SYSTEM FOR DETECTING CODE REUSE AMONG ANDROID APPLICATIONS

Abstract

We are living in the post-PC era, where smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices have grabbed the market. These mobile devices accompany huge number of useful and feature-rich applications. Mobile devices contain more sensitive information than computer systems like GPS location, contact list, owner's credential etc. Besides this mobile devices are capable of voice calling, messaging, internet connectivity etc. Apps optimize the usage of these devices. We have apps to entertain, connect with our friends, search and browse anything on the move. This attracts apps repackagers to exploit the mobile features and information contained in these devices and apps are the way to accomplish this. In this paper, we have given a systematic procedure to check whether a given app is repackaged or not. For this we have used context trigger piecewise hashing and edit distance measurements. Our prototype not only reveals whether the app is repackaged or not but also pinpoints the modified segments. Once the modified segments are recognized, Jaccard coefficient is calculated to find the similar segments. Then reverse engineering is performed only on these obtained similar segments not on the entire app. This reduces the time and efforts and improves the efficiency of reverse engineering