Anti-debugging scheme for protecting mobile apps on android platform

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.