REVERSE ENGINEERING AND STATIC ANALYSIS OF OBFUSCATION TECHNIQUES IN ANDROID MOBILE APPLICATIONS

Abstract

Android application developers are adept at obfuscating their applications to prevent the revelation of malicious activities or to safeguard intellectual property rights, particularly through the use of static analysis tools. This study focuses on obfuscation and structural complexity techniques in real world Android applications through reverse engineering. A set of Android application packages (APKs) which covers 10 functional categories and high and low sized applications were decompiled and statically analysed using JADX, APKTool, APK Easy Tool and APK Editor Studio and a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet was used for frequency analysis and visualisation. Sixteen obfuscation and structural techniques were identified and used to analyze the data by manually inspecting decompiled source code as well as manifest files and resource structures. The results indicate that the most common techniques are Third-Party SDK/Ad-SDK Integration (55) and Code Hiding through Third-Party Libraries (52), followed by Background Services (49) and Resource-Based Obfuscation (45), with the traditional Identifier Obfuscation technique being comparatively less common (28). Comparative analysis between reverse-engineering resistance, security risk and functionality suggests that Code Hiding using Third Party Libraries and SDKs provides the most effective resistance to static analysis because it removes the functionality from the analyzed artifact, as opposed to simply hiding the already present functionality. The results indicate that, in recent years, application protection in the Android ecosystem has evolved from code level protection using a single technique to multi-level protection strategies that integrate external dependencies, runtime indirection and architectural complexity. These findings are significant for malware analysts, static analysis tool developers, and application security reviewers.