Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Repackaged Android applications pose a significant threat to mobile ecosystems, acting as common vectors for malware distribution and intellectual property infringement. Addressing the challenges of existing repackaging detection methods—such as scalability, reliance on app pairs, and high computational costs—this paper presents a novel hybrid approach that combines supervised learning and symptom discovery. We develop a lightweight feature extraction and analysis framework that leverages only 20 discriminative features, including inter-component communication (ICC) patterns, sensitive API usage, permission profiles, and a structural anomaly metric derived from string offset order. Our experiments, conducted on 8441 Android applications sourced from the RePack dataset, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving a maximum F1 score of 85.9% and recall of 98.8% using Support Vector Machines—outperforming prior state-of-the-art models that utilized over 500 features. We also evaluate the standalone predictive power of AndroidSOO’s string offset order feature and highlight its value as a low-cost repackaging indicator. This work offers an accurate, efficient, and scalable alternative for automated detection of repackaged mobile applications in large-scale Android marketplaces.
Source: Information
DOI: 10.3390/info16121075
Authors: Tito Leadon, Karim Elish
Institution: Florida Polytechnic University
Language: English
Subfield: Signal Processing
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,930
OpenAlex ID: W4416993838