DeStroid – Fighting String Encryption in Android Malware

Abstract

String encryption is a popular technique to obfuscate the functionality, inner workings, and goals of Android apps. Especially malicious apps use this technique to thwart automatic and manual analyses. Typically, a human analyst has to manually identify the decryption routines and afterwards use these routines to decrypt the strings contained in an app. This is a time-consuming and tedious task. What is more, it has to be carried out potentially for every new malware version as the authors frequently modify their techniques.
We analyzed the Android malware corpus of Malpedia [1] and found that string encryption is used in more than half of the samples. This demonstrates that string encryption is still a prevailing obfuscation method nowadays. In this paper we present DeStroid, an approach to fully automatically decrypt obfuscated strings from Android apps. We focus in particular on current Android malware using advanced string encryption techniques and show that DeStroid outperforms all publicly available string deobfuscation approaches.