• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
• /
• v.16 no.2
• /
• pp.67-75
• /
• 2015

According to the changes of the mobile environments, the usage and interest of the Android apps have been increased. But the usage of illegally-copied apps has been also increased. And the transparency and dependability of the app markets has been decreased. Therefore there are many cases for the copyright infringement of app developers. Although several methods for preventing illegally-copied apps have been studied, there may exist possible ways to bypass the methods. Since it is difficult to find out the first distributors of the illegally-copied apps, it is not easy to punish them legally. This paper proposes the method of detecting illegally-copied apps. The proposed detector can detect the illegally-copied apps using odex file, which is created when the app is installed. The detector can also find out the information of the first distributors based on forensic watermark technique. Since the illegally-copied app detector is running as a service on the system server, it is granted that the detector hides from the users. As an experiment result, the illegally-copied app detector takes on average within 0.2 seconds to detect and delete an illegally-copied app.