Abstract
As Android OS increases their market share in all mobile devices and the numbers of apps are growing, the issue of app security becomes more important than ever. And many researchers point out that app piracy is a troublesome problem. The two common examples include illegal access to paid-apps and disseminating the plagiarized paid-apps. Recently, many studies have proposed their approaches, which focus on app access control, for copyright protection on Android apps. However, with Android reverse engineer, a great number of popular paid-apps have uncovered their design architecture and even source code. So they are likely to be repackaged and shared easily. Thus, our system tries to consider both requirements, including authentication on legal users and restriction on APK files. The former asks purchasers to register their order information, and then validates distributed tokens before execution each time. The latter is based on Virtual Network Computing (VNC) to allow mobile clients to remote control core apps, which is running on server. Besides, our implementation also enforces system security, like APK management, secure network connection, data confidentiality and anti-reverse engineering. Therefore, this research can solve the foregoing problem and provide a sound system to fulfill the goal of copyright protection for Android apps.