• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.1201-1215
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• 2015

Obfuscation tools can be used to protect android applications from reverse-engineering in android environment. However, obfuscation tools can also be misused to protect malicious applications. In order to evade detection of anti-virus, malware authors often apply obfuscation techniques to malicious applications. It is difficult to analyze the functionality of obfuscated malicious applications until it is deobfuscated. Therefore, a study on deobfuscation is certainly required to address the obfuscated malicious applications. In this paper, we analyze APKs which are obfuscated by commercial obfuscation tools and propose the deobfuscation method that can statically identify obfuscation options and deobfuscate it. Finally, we implement automatic identification and deobfuscation tool, then show the results of evaluation.