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http://dx.doi.org/10.13089/JKIISC.2018.28.3.643

A Static Analysis Technique for Android Apps Written with Xamarin  

Lim, Kyeong-hwan (Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Dankook University)
Kim, Gyu-sik (Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Dankook University)
Shim, Jae-woo (Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Dankook University)
Cho, Seong-je (Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Dankook University)
Publication Information
Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology / v.28, no.3, 2018 , pp. 643-653 More about this Journal
Abstract
Xamarin is a representative cross-platform development framework that allows developers to write mobile apps in C# for multiple mobile platforms, such as Android, iOS, or Windows Phone. Using Xamarin, mobile app developers can reuse existing C# code and share significant code across multiple platforms, reducing development time and maintenance costs. Meanwhile, malware authors can also use Xamarin to spread malicious apps on more platforms, minimizing the time and cost of malicious app creation. In order to cope with this problem, it is necessary to analyze and detect malware written with Xamarin. However, little studies have been conducted on static analysis methods of the apps written in Xamarin. In this paper, we examine the structure of Android apps written with Xamarin and propose a static analysis technique for the apps. We also demonstrate how to statically reverse-engineer apps that have been transformed using code obfuscation. Because the Android apps written with Xamarin consists of Java bytecode, C# based DLL libraries, and C/C++ based native libraries, we have studied static reverse engineering techniques for these different types of code.
Keywords
Xamarin framework; Android app; Cross-platform; Static analysis; Intermediate Language;
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