Reducing the impact of repackaged app on Android

Repackaging is the one of the most common techniques used by Android malwares. Recently, as one approach to prevent the repackaged malwares, it is considered to use the trust agency that guarantees the app developer. However, these approaches have no or limited secure channel to deploy the guaranteed apps. No secure channel poses another security issue of phishing. The limited channel through trust market poses the limitation in app operation. To tackle these problems, we present a secure trusted app deployment approach. Our approach inserts the guarantee generated by trust agency into app. The app with this guarantee, called Trusted APP, is signed with only developer certificate. So Trusted APP can be deployed through the existing Android Markets and has no limitation in app operation. For secure deployment, the guarantee information in the app is verified on the device before the installation. Through this verification, the proposed approach can reduce to propagate the repackaged malwares of Trusted APPs.