How to avoid reverse engineering of an APK file?

Question

I am developing a payment processing app for Android, and I want to prevent a hacker from accessing any resources, assets or source code from the APK file.<

Answer 1

Its not possible to completely avoid RE but By making them more complex internally, you put make it more difficult for attackers to see the clear operation of the app, which may reduce the number of attack vectors.

If the application handles highly sensitive data, Various techniques exist which can increase the complexity of reverse engineering your code. One technique is to use C/C++ to limit easy runtime manipulation by the attacker. There are ample C and C++ libraries that are very mature and easy to integrate with Android offers JNI. An attacker must first circumvent the debugging restrictions in order to attack the application on a low level. This adds further complexity to an attack. Android applications should have android:debuggable=”false” set in the application manifest to prevent easy run time manipulation by an attacker or malware.

Trace Checking – An application can determine whether or not it is currently being traced by a debugger or other debugging tool. If being traced, the application can perform any number of possible attack response actions, such as discarding encryption keys to protect user data, notifying a server administrator, or other such type responses in an attempt to defend itself. This can be determined by checking the process status flags or using other techniques like comparing the return value of ptrace attach, checking parent process, blacklist debuggers in the process list or comparing timestamps on different places of the program.

Optimizations - To hide advanced mathematical computations and other types of complex logic, utilizing compiler optimizations can help obfuscate the object code so that it cannot easily be disassembled by an attacker, making it more difficult for an attacker to gain an understanding of the particular code. In Android this can more easily be achieved by utilizing natively compiled libraries with the NDK. In addition, using an LLVM Obfuscator or any protector SDK will provide better machine code obfuscation.

Stripping binaries – Stripping native binaries is an effective way to increase the amount of time and skill level required of an attacker in order to view the makeup of your application’s low level functions. By stripping a binary, the symbol table of the binary is stripped, so that an attacker cannot easily debug or reverse engineer an application.You can refer techniques used on GNU/Linux systems like sstriping or using UPX.

And at last you must be aware about obfuscation and tools like ProGuard.