An Online Approach for Detecting Repackaged Android Applications Based on Multi-user Collaboration

Repackaged Android applications have been the major sources of mobile malware. There are two main mechanisms to detect repackaged apps. The first way is to insert self-checking codes to determine whether it is repackaged when the app is running, which can be done by developers. However, the self-checking codes are easy to be cracked. The second way is to scan and compare APK files to search potential repackaged apps, which can be done by app markets. However, some of app markets do not conduct repackaging detection in reality. Therefore, it is necessary for app users to defense against repackaged apps. For app users, we propose a new repackaging detection method, which is a novel online approach based on multi-user collaboration.