SmalAnalysis

Android Bytecode Analysis Tools

This repo contains some tools I've built to work with APK and smali files. Mainly, it contains a toolkit for parsing smali output and mapping an APK internal with Python objects. Best coding practices are not enforced as it is research code. This code is not highly optimized. It is mainly intended to get a quick insight on whats going on on an APK.

ℹ️ The tools in this repo work good with unobfuscated APKs. Due to the simplicity of the parser, it can hardly deal with complex strigs found in latest obfuscations techniques.

Some incoherencies may exists in this README and subsequent documentation as some part are took back from old e-mail exchanges and so on. Do not hesitate to report any bug/incoherency.

Requirements

Tested on MacOS. Should run well on UNIX/Linux systems. Definitively not work on Windows systems.

You will need:

• a working python3 environement;
• a working Java installation to run the baksmali tool (a copy of version 2.2.1 is present in this repo, it remain the property of its author).;
  • This tools works with version 2.2.1 of baksmali. No test has been done on other versions.
• a working version of the aapt tool in your system PATH.

Installation

In order ot make this tool work, you will require a working installation of Python 3.6. Moreover, the following tools should be installed and present in the system PATH in order to work:

• JRE
• Android aapt command

Then, to proceed with the installation using pip:

pip install git+https://github.com/v-m/smalanalysis.git

Disassembling

The sa-disassemble command is a short hand script to invoke the baksmali tool offered by @JesusFreke. To sum up, it simply:

• Extract the dexes classes from apk file;
• Feed these to the baksmali tool;
• Produce a ZIP archive containing all the smali files.

⚠️ This archive is the expected input format for the scripts present in this repo (as it mainly work on smali).

Learn more in the wiki page.

Getting a package name (ID)

A shorthand function is available to get the package name/id. It simply query the aapt tool and parse the output.

>>> from smalanalysis.tools.commands import queryAaptForPackageName
>>> queryAaptForPackageName("/Users/vince/base.apk")
b'com.android.packagename'

Analyzing APKs

This framework proposes a really simple object representation of a smali file. After disassembling an APK, the structure of the APK is represented based on an internal representation.

>>> from smalanalysis.smali.SmaliProject import SmaliProject
>>> proj = SmaliProject()
>>> proj.parseProject('/Users/vince/base.apk.smali')

At this stage proj contains a representation of the project (ie a SmaliProject class).

Learn more in the wiki page.

Diffing APKs

A large part of this project proposes a diffing tool which allows to list a set of differences between two APKs. Here is how to run the differences computation between two versions:

• Disassemble both APKs
• Load two SmaliProject as decribed previously;
• Invoke the differences() methods to get a list of changes.

Learn more in the wiki page.

Diffing Metrics

The tool sa-metrics can be used to compute different evolution metrics between two versions of an app. It works on output archived produced by the sa-disassemble tool. Same inclusion/exclusion parameters can be passed to this function.

Learn more in the wiki page.