Automated Obfuscation of Android Applications

Astract:

This bachelor’s thesis examines obfuscation techniques to protect Android applica- tions from unauthorized code analysis. The high amount of information contained in the portable bytecode of Android applications demands protection from reverse- engineering.Obfuscation makes it more difficult to understand and retrieve algorithms and data structures that can be obtained by reversing the code of a program.An overview of different obfuscation transformations is presented and the application of two of them is discussed in detail. Based on this theory, a framework for automated obfuscation of Android applications was developed.The framework consists of an Eclipse Builder Plugin for the integration into the Android development process and a set of transformers to apply obfuscation transfor- mations on the bytecode.It is capable of obfuscating identifiers and performing control flow flattening using transformers written in the Java language and can easily be extended with additional transformations.