Hardcoded Secrets Unveiled: A Study of Static Access Token Exploitation in Real-World Android Applications

This research presents a detailed analysis of the security risks associated with the use of static access tokens. Many APIs still rely on static access tokens for application authentication, and these can be extracted from compiled and published applications.The study investigates 20 weather applications from the Play Store to analyze the protection techniques used to conceal these tokens. This research paper examines the most common approaches that developers use to store access tokens. Reverse engineering tools and techniques are also introduced that can be used to verify an application’s security before publishing it.This paper presents extensive case studies demonstrating that local encryption and algorithms can be decoded by analyzing the reverse-engineered codebase. These examples illustrate that it is not possible to securely hide sensitive information within applications, API owners have to migrate to a modern, dynamic authentication method.