A Study on Comparing Similarity of Dex files on Android Smartphones (안드로이드 스마트폰에서 Dex 파일들의 유사도 비교 연구)

Jeonguk, Ko (고정욱); Kang SeongWook (강성욱); Jeongoh Moon (문정오); Dongjin Kim (김동진); SEONG JE CHO (조성제)

A Study on Comparing Similarity of Dex files on Android Smartphones

Journal of Software Assessment and Valuation
Abbr : JSAV
2013, 9(1), pp.7-14
Publisher : Korea Software Assessment and Valuation Society
Research Area : Engineering > Computer Science
Received : June 5, 2013
Accepted : June 27, 2013
Published : June 30, 2013

Jeonguk, Ko ¹, Kang SeongWook ¹, Jeongoh Moon ², Dongjin Kim ¹, SEONG JE CHO ¹

¹단국대학교
²단국대

ABSTRACT

Copyright infringement in Android applications is a growing problem because Android applications can be easily reverse engineered and pirated. In this paper, we propose three techniques for comparing similarity between Android applications in order to detect the theft of the applications. The proposed techniques statically analyze the Dalvik VM executable files in the Dalvik Executable (.dex) format, and measure similarity between the executable files (DEX files). The first technique decompiles DEX (VM bytecode) files into corresponding Java source codes and computes similarity between the decompiled source codes. The second technique extracts string information contained in DEX files and calculates similarity between applications based on the string information. The last technique extracts methods’ features defined DEX files and compares similarity between applications based on the features. We evaluate the performance of the proposed techniques in terms of credibility and resilience by carrying out some experiments.

KEYWORDS

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

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