Detecting Code Reuse in Android Applications Using Component-Based Control Flow Graph

Recently smartphones and mobile devices have gained incredible popularity for their vibrant feature-rich applications (or apps). Because it is easy to repackage Android apps, software plagiarism has become a serious problem. In this paper, we present an accurate and robust system DroidSim to detect code reuse. DroidSim calculates similarity score only with component-based control flow graph (CB-CFG). CB-CFG is a graph of which nodes are Android APIs and edges represent control flow precedence order in each Android component. Our system can be applied to detect repackaged apps and malware variants. We evaluate DroidSim on 121 apps and 706 malware variants. The results show that our system has no false negative and a false positive of 0.83% for repackaged apps, and a detection ratio of 96.60% for malware variants. Besides, ADAM is used to obfuscate apps and the result reveals that ADAM has no influence on our system.