Paper Info
Title
AppInk: watermarking android apps for repackaging deterrence
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2484313.2484315
ASIACCS
Keywords
Field
DocType
android apps,automatic watermark embedding,target android app,manifest app,app developer,embedded watermark,android platform,new app,transparently-embedded watermark,app market operator
Internet privacy,World Wide Web,Digital watermarking,Android (operating system),End user,Computer security,Repackaging,Computer science,Source code,Watermark,Robustness (computer science),Mobile device
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
35
1.11
29
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wu Zhou197351.20
Xinwen Zhang269746.90
Xuxian Jiang35610280.25