Smart Card Based Protection for Dalvik Bytecode – Dynamically Loadable Component of an Android APK

Abstract

The global smartphone market is growing at a brisk pace and 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 owing to the use of open source platform. Therefore, it becomes important to protect applications running on Android from attacks like Break Once Run Everywhere (BORE), tampering, illegal use and distribution. The goal is to minimize software flaws by using anti-reverse engineering techniques. In this paper, we present a protection scheme based on obfuscation, code modification and cryptographic protection. The combination of these protection techniques in a single solution can effectively counter reverse engineering on the Android platform. Our approach makes it tough for an attacker to get the business logic performed by an Android application such that the resources and time expended in reverse engineering would be more than are required in building a new application.