Understanding Android Obfuscation Techniques: A Large-Scale Investigation in the Wild

Program code is a valuable asset to its owner. Due to the easy-to-reverse nature of Java, code protection for Android apps is of particular importance. To this end, code obfuscation is widely utilized by both legitimate app developers and malware authors, which complicates the representation of source code or machine code in order to hinder the manual investigation and code analysis. Despite many previous studies focusing on the obfuscation techniques, however, our knowledge of how obfuscation is applied by real-world developers is still limited.