The Android operating structure is very popular, and developers are continuously creating new apps made to function on the system. Usually, all mobile code is vulnerable to reverse engineering, but if the code is written in different languages that have versatile self-analysis like Java, it’s at high risk. Let’s understand why Android app obfuscation is important.
Why Android Apps need obfuscation
The android operating system is open-source, which works as a trump card for developers to be creative and make record-breaking apps, but at the same time, there is an increased risk of the phone being attacked by hackers.
A lot of researchers researching financial services apps talk about the fact that a huge number of apps for Android devices don’t use the method of obfuscation, and even if they are using it, it is not being used to its full potential.
Unprotected Android Apps enhance the risk of revealing your business to theft, reputation damage, and loss of revenue. Developers must protect their apps against such threats with a powerful layer of defense to protect critical code from hackers.
What are the different advantages of obfuscating code for Android apps?
Obfuscation is a sequence of transformation of code that changes the application code in a modified version which is hard to understand and reverse engineer.
This way, you can ensure that your product’s intellectual property is safeguarded against the discovery of app instability, security threats, and unauthorized access.
When any app’s code is obfuscated, the risk of a hacker carrying reverse engineering is slightly increased, as it will be tedious and expensive to proceed.
With code obfuscation following can be done:
- It prevents the code from being copied and used without authorization.
- It makes your app functional logic on the client’s side, and the algorithms are less exposed.
- It also makes it difficult for hackers to find discrepancies in your code.
How to protect your Android Apps?
Code obfuscation is a basic method to prevent hackers from decompiling and reverse engineering an app’s code. A lot of android apps don’t have a satisfactory level of protection and limit their obfuscation to code reduction alone.
For Android apps, one should opt for security software that has advanced and various obfuscation techniques.
What are the different obfuscation techniques?
- Renaming
In Renaming, class, function, and techniques will be renamed randomly. The standard transformation is used by many obfuscators such as IOS, Android, and Java. It is done by renaming method names and variables. It uses new strings, numbers, letters, and unprintable characters for the transformation process.
- Namespace flattening
All obfuscated classes shall be moved to a big flat namespace which can be detached from information about logical class grouping.
- Code Shuffling
A particular code that belongs to one class can be moved to another class, and all testimonials to this code can be updated accordingly. This creates a new app’s internal code dependencies that confuse both the attacker and also act as an internal binding mechanism that makes it very hard to remove specific parts of the code tree.
- String Encryption
All the strings are understandable in managed executables. Even though variables and methods are renamed, strings are used to navigate the code segments by looking for string references inside binary files. For e.g., error messages that are displayed to the user can make a strong impact on the attacker. Thus, string encryption is used to hide strings in an executable file.
- Control flow obfuscation
In control flow obfuscation, decompiled code looks more like mixed logic, which is very tough for the hackers to understand in other words, control flow obfuscation synthesizes conditional, iterative construction that creates a valid executable. This technique is applied to the runtime performance of a method.
- Instruction Pattern Transformation
Instruction patterns are used to convert instructions created by the developer to others less obvious constructs. They are high-level, sophisticated legal machine language guidelines that cannot be mapped out cleanly to high technical languages such as c# or Java.
- Dummy Code Insertion
When inserting codes into the executable that don’t affect the logic of the main program, it gets harder to break the reverse engineering of the code and is tough to analyze.
- Unused Code and metadata removal
It is very important to remove debug information that encompasses logs, used code segments, and non-essential metadata from the applications and are made it smaller that reduce the amount of information that is revealed to the hackers. This approach affects the improvement of performance.
- Binary linking and merging
This technique combines various input executables and libraries into one or more binaries. This link can be used to make the application smaller. It will also help to ease the deployment scenarios and even reduce the information for the hackers.
- Opaque predicate Insertion
This method is used to obfuscate by attaching conditional branches that always analyze the expected result that cannot be determined through static analysis. This is the actual way of introducing wrong code to the attackers that will never be executed, but it confuses the attackers who try to understand the decompiled output.
- Anti-Tamper
An obfuscator can insert self-protection in their code to verify that the application has not been tampered with at all. If at all tampering is recognized, it will close the application, restrict the functionality, supplicate random crashes (find out the reason for the crash), or execute any other action. It will also send a message to the service provider about the tampering being found.
- Anti-Debug
When a hacker is trying to raid your application, steal your data, or change the behavior of an important piece of infrastructure software, they will start with reverse engineering and move through your application with a debugger. An obfuscator layers the application of self-protection by inserting code to see if your production application is functioning within a debugger. If at all debugger is used, it can hamper the sensitive data, supplicate random crashes and perform any other action required. It will also send a warning message to the service provider.
Conclusion
Application development cannot be done in separation, and it requires a sturdy strategy to make sure that the application is fine from both security and functionality perspectives. With the help of code obfuscation, any team can protect the codes from hackers.
