android - Piracy, piracy, piracy. What can I do?

Question

I've just released an app, a paid app, 4 days later a user told me there's another web site in China hosts my app. I downloaded it from there, and it does run fine on my device!

There are posts here saying people can change the package name and republish an apk. But this is not my case, the cracked version still uses the same package name. I used Android Vending Licensing in the program, but the cracked version does not do licensing check at all. I used ProGuard to obfuscate it, but that doesn't discourage the hackers.

Question #1: I signed the apk file according to Google's instructions. But still, they modified the code and took out the licensing check part. Am I wrong that signing an apk file is designed to keep people from tampering with the file content?

Question #2: For Win32 .exe programs, I used to use a checksum to determine if the file has been altered. This is how it works: When a .exe is created, I used a tool to calculate the sum of byte contents of the file, then stuff it into somewhere in the file, for example, 4 bytes after a text pattern "MY SIGNATURE". Then at run time, the program opens the .exe file and calculates the byte sum, compares it with the integer after the signature.

Has anybody tried this approach on apk files? Care to share your experiences?

Answer 1

Ultimately the built in protection of apps in Android is very poor. Here are your best practices.

1) Yes Google's recommendation to use code obfuscation, signed coded, and their license verification server is designed to prevent software theft. Their implementation however is highly flawed. The only requirement that an APK has to run is that it be signed. It doesn't matter who signed it though. There are no checks that your signature is the one it's signed with. So to crack it you just remove the license check and re-sign with whatever cert you want. Then a user can load it on their phone with "allow non market apps" checked.

Don't use Google licensing as is. Modify the code heavily. Add some new parameters to use when generating the keys. Move the code around / re-architect it. Don't include the Google licensing library as a library project. Put it directly in your code. Make the code as spindly and kludgy as possible. Add functions that do nothing, but modify the values on the fly. Make other functions later that convert them back. Spread license verification throughout your entire code base.

If you don't do those steps then the code can be cracked automatically. By doing those steps at least the cracker needs to take the time to hand crack it. That would probably only take a few hours at most. But a few hours is much much more time than instantly cracking the standard Google licensing layer. There are cracker tools that will actually just auto-download newly released android packages and, if they use the standard android licensing, crack them and upload the cracked APKs to these types of web sites. By making your implementation not the vanilla implementation you make things much harder, with only a few hours effort on your end.

2) This is a common anti-crack technique. You can do this on Android if you want. But it can be cracked in about 5 minutes. If you Google there are tutorials on how to crack this specific technique. Basically you just look for the CRC call in the code and remove the check after the CRC comes back.

Android has no inherent security. You can root any phone and download the APK. You can easily hack an APK to enable debugging and simply step the code to see any keys you have stored in the code. So in the end I wouldn't spend too much time on this. It's impossible to secure an Android App. I would just do the common sense stuff in the list above and move on.

3) If you're really paranoid you can implement your own licensing on your own licensing server. This is the approach I took, but not as much for protecting the app for theft, as it was to give me a mechanism to sell apps directly from my website so users that don't have Google Play could still purchase my apps.