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Anti-debugging scheme for protecting mobile apps on android platform

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Abstract

The Android application package file, APK file, can be easily decompiled using Android reverse engineering tools. Thus, general apps can be easily transformed into malicious application through reverse engineering and analysis. These repacked apps could be uploaded in general android app market called Google Play Store and redistributed. To prevent theses malicious behaviors such as malicious code injection or code falsifications, many techniques and tools were developed. However, these techniques also can be analyzed using debuggers. Also, analyzed apps can be tampered easily. For example, when applying anti-analysis techniques to android apps using Dexprotector which is commercial tool for protecting android app, it can be seen that these techniques can also be analyzed using debugger. In this paper, to protect the android app from the attack using debugger, we propose anti-debugging techniques for native code debugging and managed code debugging of android apps.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Global Research Laboratory (GRL) program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2014K1A1A2043029).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Soongsil University, Seoul, 156-743, Korea

    Haehyun Cho, Jongsu Lim, Hyunki Kim & Jeong Hyun Yi

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  1. Haehyun Cho
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  2. Jongsu Lim
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  3. Hyunki Kim
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  4. Jeong Hyun Yi
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Correspondence to Jeong Hyun Yi.

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Cho, H., Lim, J., Kim, H. et al. Anti-debugging scheme for protecting mobile apps on android platform. J Supercomput 72, 232–246 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-015-1559-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-015-1559-9

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