Wltdroid: Repackaging detection approach for android applications

Abstract

Huge number of mobile applications are downloaded every year. These benefits promote the rapid development of the mobile application industry, especially Android applications for its openness. But, because of the low cost and good profit, Android application repackaging also developed quickly, which can make a kind of malware applications and publish them to the Android market. Therefore, in order to defend against this dangerous technology, repackaging detection technology has been continuously studied in recent years. Contrary to the repackaging detection technique, obfuscation techniques are used in the application repacking to avoid detection. This makes the effectiveness of many existing methods be affected. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on Dynamic Whole Layout Tree extraction, that we call WLTDroid, which can avoid the interference of the layout file obfuscation. The experimental results show that the approach proposed in this paper can resist the obfuscation affect better than other repackaging detection methods. In addition, our approach is more accurate than the existing method RepDroid.