Obfuscated Android Application Development

Obfuscation techniques help developers to hide their code when distributing an Android application. The used techniques are linked to the features provided by the programming language but also with the way the application is executed. Using obfuscation is now a common practice and specialized companies sell tools or services for automatizing the manipulation of the source code. In this paper, we present how to develop obfuscated applications and how obfuscation technique usage is evolving in the wild. First, using advanced obfuscation techniques requires some advanced knowledge about the development of Android applications. We describe how to build such applications for helping researchers to generate samples of obfuscated applications for their own research. Second, the use of obfuscation techniques is evolving for both regular applications or malicious ones. We aim at measuring the development of these usages by studying application and malware samples and the artifacts that indicate the use of obfuscation techniques.