Survey on Reverse-Engineering Tools for Android Mobile Devices

Abstract

With the presence of the Internet and the frequent use of mobile devices to send several transactions that involve personal and sensitive information, it becomes of great importance to consider the security aspects of mobile devices. And with the increasing use of mobile applications that are utilized for several purposes such as healthcare or banking, those applications have become an easy and attractive target for attackers who want to get access to mobile devices and obtain users’ sensitive information. Developing a secure application is very important; otherwise, attackers can easily exploit vulnerabilities in mobile applications which lead to serious security issues such as information leakage or injecting applications with malicious programs to access user data. In this paper, we survey the literature on application security on mobile devices, specifically mobile devices running on the Android platform, and exhibit security threats in the Android system. In addition, we study many reverse-engineering tools that are utilized to exploit vulnerabilities in applications. We demonstrate several reverse-engineering tools in terms of methodology, security holes that can be exploited, and how to use these tools to help in developing more secure applications.

An analysis of differences in behaviors and practices of security-conscious users and regular users on mobile devices

“…Albakri et al (2022) advise against installing software from untrustworthy sources. Users should also only download applications from reliable sources.…”

“…Therefore, security-conscious users are aware of security practices, including preserving data confidentiality, use of firewalls and data encryption. Albakri et al (2022) advise against installing software from untrustworthy sources. Users should also only download applications from reliable sources.…”

Developing Secured Android Applications by Mitigating Code Vulnerabilities with Machine Learning

“…The first way is to analyse the code by reverse-engineering the developed Android Application Packages (APKs). It is the most popular and the easiest way, but a pre-build application is required to follow this approach [1]. The second way is to analyse the source code simultaneously as the code is being written, which is more valuable to the developers.…”