Reverse Engineering APKS for Analysis

Abstract: The Android operating system has a large number of user base worldwide which results in approximately 80 percent of the world population using android. The application it runs are called Android Package Kit (APK) which can directly be installed on android device for running the application. We present how these Application Kits can be reverse engineered for code inspection or for other general analysis purposes. We use old school method of decompressing the package as a file and then extract codes from it.This later can be passed on to third party tools for the analysis of the structure.

Keywords: APE, SDE (Software Developers Eit), XML (Extensible Markup Language), Obfuscation , Java, Android, App, API (Application Programming Interface).