Clone Analysis and Detection in Android Applications

With the rapid development of mobile application markets, smartphones and mobile devices are more and more popular and widely used. However, at the same time that brings more disadvantages to users such as the probability of user information leakage is higher. Among any other threats, Android application cloning has brought tremendous risks to the market environment. It is not always feasible to distinguish the applications by comparing application release dates or file sizes. In this paper, we perform a systematic analysis in Android applications. We test the difference of obfuscated and not obfuscated applications by Androguard to verify its resistance against Proguard at first. Then explain that modified applications may bring some disadvantages to unsuspecting users by smali instrumentation. We compute the similarity value of modified and original apps with Androguard. Finally, we use a testing tool based Robotium to detect the details such as the UI of applications. The experimental results proved the effectiveness of the system in similarity detection. And we present the application of image processing technology in the similarity detection.