UI Obfuscation and Its Effects on Automated UI Analysis for Android Apps
The UI driven nature of Android apps has motivated the development of automated UI analysis for various purposes, such as app analysis, malicious app detection, and app testing. Although existing automated UI analysis methods have demonstrated their capability in dissecting apps’ UI, little is known about their effectiveness in the face of app protection techniques, which have been adopted by more and more apps. In this paper, we take a first step to systematically investigate UI obfuscation for Android apps and its effects on automated UI analysis. In particular, we point out the weaknesses in existing automated UI analysis methods and design 9 UI obfuscation approaches. We implement these approaches in a new tool named UIObfuscator after tackling several technical challenges. Moreover, we feed 3 kinds of tools that rely on automated UI analysis with the apps protected by UIObfuscator, and find that their performances severely drop. This work reveals limitations of automated UI analysis and sheds light on app protection techniques.
Tue 22 SepDisplayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change
09:10 - 10:10 | Mobile App (1)Tool Demonstrations / Research Papers at Koala Chair(s): Jacques Klein University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg | ||
09:10 20mTalk | Demystifying Diehard Android Apps Research Papers Hao Zhou The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Haoyu Wang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China, Yajin Zhou Zhejiang University, Xiapu Luo The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Yutian Tang ShanghaiTech University, Lei Xue The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Ting Wang Penn State University | ||
09:30 20mTalk | UI Obfuscation and Its Effects on Automated UI Analysis for Android Apps Research Papers Hao Zhou The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Ting Chen University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Haoyu Wang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China, Le Yu The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Xiapu Luo The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Ting Wang Penn State University, Wei Zhang Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications | ||
09:50 10mTalk | FILO: FIx-LOcus Localization for Backward Incompatibilities Caused by Android Framework Upgrades Tool Demonstrations Marco Mobilio University of Milano Bicocca, Oliviero Riganelli University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, Daniela Micucci University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, Leonardo Mariani University of Milano Bicocca |