AppInk: watermarking android apps for repackaging deterrence

  • Authors:

  • Wu Zhou;Xinwen Zhang;Xuxian Jiang

  • Affiliations:

  • North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA;Huawei Research Center, Santa Clara, CA, USA;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGSAC symposium on Information, computer and communications security
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

With increased popularity and wide adoption of smartphones and mobile devices, recent years have seen a new burgeoning economy model centered around mobile apps. However, app repackaging, among many other threats, brings tremendous risk to the ecosystem, including app developers, app market operators, and end users. To mitigate such threat, we propose and develop a watermarking mechanism for Android apps. First, towards automatic watermark embedding and extraction, we introduce the novel concept of manifest app, which is a companion of a target Android app under protection. We then design and develop a tool named AppInk, which takes the source code of an app as input to automatically generate a new app with a transparently-embedded watermark and the associated manifest app. The manifest app can be later used to reliably recognize embedded watermark with zero user intervention. To demonstrate the effectiveness of AppInk in preventing app repackaging, we analyze its robustness in defending against distortive, subtractive, and additive attacks, and then evaluate its resistance against two open source repackaging tools. Our results show that AppInk is easy to use, effective in defending against current known repackaging threats on Android platform, and introduces small performance overhead.