Repackaged Apps

Repackaging is a serious threat in the Android ecosystem as it deprives app developers from the benefits of their efforts, contributes to spreading malware on users' devices, and increases the workload of market maintainers. In the space of 4 years, the research around this specific issue has produced about 41 works which are either unscalable and impractical, or are poorly evaluated and in any case without tool support available to the community. Through a systematic literature review of the subject, we argue that the research is slowing down, where many state-of-the-art approaches have reported high performance rates on closed datasets. In this work, we propose to reboot the research in repackaged app detection by enumerating some real challenges to address, providing a large benchmark, and implementing a new practical and scalable repackaged detection approach with reasonable performance scores. We hope that these contributions will spark innovative approaches beyond attempts to improve scalability of pairwise comparisons. To access data on the SLR data on the reviewed paper: git clone https://github.com/serval-snt-uni-lu/RepackageRepo.git We provide the benchmarking repackaging pairs (column in left includes original apps, while right includes repackaged apps).