@Article{2018.100000051,
AUTHOR = {Kyeonghwan Lim, Nak Young Kim, Younsik Jeong, Seong-je Cho, Sangchul Han, Minkyu Park},
TITLE = {Protecting Android Applications with Multiple DEX Files Against Static Reverse Engineering Attacks},
JOURNAL = {Intelligent Automation \& Soft Computing},
VOLUME = {25},
YEAR = {2019},
NUMBER = {1},
PAGES = {143--153},
URL = {http://www.techscience.com/iasc/v25n1/39642},
ISSN = {2326-005X},
ABSTRACT = {The Android application package (APK) uses the DEX format as an executable 
file format. Since DEX files are in Java bytecode format, you can easily get Java 
source code using static reverse engineering tools. This feature makes it easy 
to steal Android applications. Tools such as ijiami, liapp, alibaba, etc. can be 
used to protect applications from static reverse engineering attacks. These tools 
typically save encrypted classes.dex in the APK file, and then decrypt and load 
dynamically when the application starts. However, these tools do not protect 
multidex Android applications. A multidex Android application is an APK that 
contains multiple DEX files, mostly used in a large-scale application. We 
propose a method to protect multidex Android applications from static reverse 
engineering attacks. The proposed method encrypts multiple DEX files and 
stores them in an APK file. When an APK is launched, encrypted DEX files are 
decrypted and loaded dynamically. Experiment results show that the proposed 
method can effectively protect multidex APKs.},
DOI = {10.31209/2018.100000051}
}