RepDroid: An Automated Tool for Android Application Repackaging Detection

In recent years, with the explosive growth of mobile smart phonesnes, the number of Android applications (apps) increases rapidly. Attackers usually leverage the popumobile smart phoneslarity of Android apps by inserting malwares, modifying the original apps, repackaging and releasing them for their own illegal purposes. To avoid repackaged apps from being detected, they usually use sorts of obfuscation and encryption tools. As a result, it's important to detect which apps are repackaged. People often intuitively judge whether two apps are a repackaged pair by executing them and observing their runtime user interface (UI) traces. Hence, we propose layout group graph (LGG) built from UI trances to model those UI behaviors and use LGG as the birthmark of Android apps for identification. Based on LGG, we also implement a dynamic repackaging detection tool, RepDroid. Since our method does not require the apps' source code, it is resilient to app obfuscation and encryption. We conducted an experiment with two data sets. The first set contains 98 pairs of repackaged apps. The original apps and repackaged ones are compared and we can detect all of these repackaged pairs. The second set contains 125 commercial apps. We compared them pair-wisely and the false positive rate was 0.08%.