Android Application Analysis using Reverse Engineering Techniques and Taint-Aware Slicing
Syed Arshad, Ashwin Kumar · International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies · 2014
Android is a victim of its own success, not just in the way it has attracted malicious attention, but in its very nature. One of the reasons the OS has succeeded in gaining market share so rapidly is that it is open source; it is essentially free for manufacturers to implement, excluding patent settlements. Android platform provide only coarse-grained permissions to users with regard to how third party applications use sensitive private data. Malicious applications pose a threat to the security of the Android platform. The growing amount and diversity of these applications render conventional defenses largely ineffective and thus Android smartphones often remain unprotected from novel malware. In this paper, we propose AT2: ―Android Taint Analysis Tool‖, a lightweight tool uses static method for analyzing Android applications (APKs) and generating a detailed report of the analysis performed. As the limited resources impede monitoring applications dynamically at run-time, AT2 is a tool which performs a static analysis and gathers as many features of an application as possible. AT2 analyzes Dalvik bytecode, represented as Smali code, a disassembled version of the DEX format used by Android's Java VM implementation. The provided application is sliced in order to perform data-flow analyses to backtrack parameters used by a given method. This helps to identify suspicious code regions in an automated way. General Terms Reverse Engineering, Decompilation, Verification, Security