Repackman: a tool for automatic repackaging of Android apps

Abstract

Repackaging is a technique adopted by attackers to generate fake, malicious versions of legitimate Android apps, which undermines users’ trust in the Android ecosystem. Unfortunately, the process of releasing and evaluating anti-repackaging techniques is hindered by the difficulty of acquiring repackaged versions of legitimate apps that employ those techniques on demand. In this paper, we present Repackman, a tool to automatically repackage Android apps with arbitrary payloads. We evaluate the feasibility and reliability of the tool and furnish it upon request for the research community to generate repackaged apps on demand for research purposes.