Android Malware Threats: A Strengthened Reverse Engineering Approach to Forensic Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14421/jiska.2025.10.1.122-138Keywords:
Malware Android, Reverse Engineering, Android Security, Digital Forensic, CybersecurityAbstract
The widespread adoption of Android devices has rendered them a primary target for malware attacks, resulting in substantial financial losses and significant breaches of user privacy. Malware can exploit system vulnerabilities to execute unauthorized premium SMS transactions, exfiltrate sensitive data, and install additional malicious applications. Conventional detection methodologies, such as static and dynamic analysis, often prove inadequate in identifying deeply embedded malicious behaviors. This study introduces a systematic reverse engineering framework for analysing suspicious Android applications. In contrast to traditional approaches, the proposed methodology consists of six distinct stages: Initialization, decompilation, static analysis, code reversing, behavioral analysis, and reporting. This structured process facilitates a comprehensive examination of an application's internal mechanisms, enabling the identification of concealed malware functionalities. The findings of this study demonstrate that the proposed method attains an overall effectiveness of 84.3%, surpassing conventional static and dynamic analysis techniques. Furthermore, this research generates a detailed list of files containing specific malware indicators, thereby enhancing future malware detection and prevention systems. These results underscore the efficacy of reverse engineering as a critical tool for understanding and mitigating sophisticated Android malware threats.
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