UI Ripping in Android: Reverse Engineering of Graphical User Interfaces and its Application

Android applications are user interaction intensive programs, that makes UI become an indispensable part of mobile applications. UI also reflects information, such as the functions of applications, that makes the study of Android UI very significant. We design a UI modeling method based on attribute graph by the technology of reverse engineering and program analysis for applications on Android. The proposed method is also applied to malware repackage detection and evaluation of the application family resemblance. This method depicts Widgets consisted in UI and relationships between UIs, based of the assumption that 1) repackaged applications are similar on UI and 2) functions and appearances are highly similar between the members of families. Our method achieves 94.74% success rate at UI model and detects 2231 (26.13%) repackaged applications discovering around 50.0% applications have the exact same UI. The result shows that the UI modeling method helps develop more comprehensive application to detect repackaged applications include malicious ones.