Two-factor Protection Scheme in Securing the Source Code of Android Applications

While Android has become most popular OS in mobile phone market, more and more Android app developers are suffering from intellectual property infringement because it’s easy to extract the assets stored in the Android apps and to decompile Android apps to Java source code. This issue also poses threats to users’ privacy. In this article we reviewed the existing protection approaches for the protection of the source code and assets in Android apps, demonstrated the reason why Java Native Interface (JNI) approach can help improve the protection provided by existing approaches, developed 4 Android demo apps with 2 experiments conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of protection provided by the combination of Encryption and JNI approaches.