Survey on Reverse-Engineering Tools for Android Mobile Devices

Abstract

With the presence of the Internet and the frequent use of mobile devices to send several transactions that involve personal and sensitive information, it becomes of great importance to consider the security aspects of mobile devices. And with the increasing use of mobile applications that are utilized for several purposes such as healthcare or banking, those applications have become an easy and attractive target for attackers who want to get access to mobile devices and obtain users’ sensitive information. Developing a secure application is very important; otherwise, attackers can easily exploit vulnerabilities in mobile applications which lead to serious security issues such as information leakage or injecting applications with malicious programs to access user data. In this paper, we survey the literature on application security on mobile devices, specifically mobile devices running on the Android platform, and exhibit security threats in the Android system. In addition, we study many reverse-engineering tools that are utilized to exploit vulnerabilities in applications. We demonstrate several reverse-engineering tools in terms of methodology, security holes that can be exploited, and how to use these tools to help in developing more secure applications.