Memory hacking analysis in mobile devices for hybrid model of copyright protection for Android apps

Abstract

Google's Android platform is a widely used operating system for mobile phones and a fully commercial application (App) market has been established. However, because of the easy access to Android internal files, unlicensed Android Apps are widely being distributed. To protect the intellectual property of Android developers, various techniques are being proposed that can prevent the illegal access to Apps [6]. But all current techniques ignore the possibility of memory hacking. We show by example that memory hacking is actually possible on Android devices. In this paper we especially focused on the possibility of memory hacking and show that it is indeed possible, which shows that the memory hacking factor has to be included in the security analysis of current protection systems.