DexFus: An Android Obfuscation Technique Based on Dalvik Bytecode Translation

Cracking and repackaging is a severe threat to Android applications. Obfuscation increases the difficulty of reverse analysis without changing the semantics of the original code. However, current Android obfuscation techniques primarily concentrate on Dalvik bytecode obfuscation, as Dalvik bytecode contains much semantic information, obfuscation does not hinder the attacker much. We propose a new technique named DexFus for protecting Android code based on Dalvik bytecode translation. DexFus applies obfuscation on translated C code instead of the original Dalvik code, which provides a higher level protection for applications. A prototype deployment on the Android platform demonstrates that DexFus is able to protect target applications with reasonable storage and memory overhead and high stability.