Remote Protection for Mobile Apps in Cloud Computing Environments

Abstract

Android app repackaging has become a serious problem currently. To protect apps from tampering, code obfuscation, watermarking and other techniques have been designed. However, most of these approaches could only provide inadequate protection. Meanwhile, it is possible to achieve remote tamper-resistance in recent, especially for networking apps, with the development of cloud computing technology and the spread of networks. In this paper, we propose a novel remote protection mechanism for mobile apps in cloud computing environments. In the proposed mechanism, the app should download and execute some code from the cloud when some important function is called. Tamper proofing code which could check the app is tampered or not is embedded in the downloaded code. Furthermore, the code can only run correctly one time and is continuous changing, which makes it difficult for an adversary to analyze and modify.