International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering

Abstract—The global smartphone market is growing at a brisk pace. Android, an open source platform of Google has become one of the most popular mobile operating systems. Android apps generate lot of revenue which is increasing every year. The reverse engineering of Android applications is much easier than owing to the use of open source platform. Therefore, it becomes important to protect applications running on Android from attackers. The goal is to minimize software flaws and use anti-reverse engineering techniques. In this paper, we present a protection scheme based on obfuscation, code modification and cryptographic protection that can effectively counter reverse engineering on the Android platform. Our approach aims at making it tough for a reverse engineer to get the business logic performed by an Android application.

Index Terms—Software protection, Android, dalvik bytecode, reverse engineering, code obfuscation, anti-reverse engineering, cryptography.

All the author are with School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS) NUST Campus H-12, Islamabad, Pakistan (e-mail: 11msccsmshoaib@seecs.edu.pk, 11msccsnyasin@seecs.edu.pk, Abdul.ghafoor@seecs.edu.pk).

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Cite:Muhammad Shoaib, Noor Yasin, and Abdul G. Abbassi, "Smart Card Based Protection for Dalvik Bytecode — Dynamically Loadable Component of an Android APK," International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 156-160, 2016.