Reverse engineering Android applications

Android is the fastest growing mobile platform. This market growth has attracted malware authors. For example, in 2011, the number of malware applications targeting Android more than doubled. However, while the number of malware applications has increased, there has not been a corresponding growth in the number of tools which can be used to analyze Android applications. In this thesis we attempt to fill some of the holes in reverse engineers toolkit.To achieve this goal, we opted to provided a formalized process for extracting and packaging Android applications, a novel technique which enables engineers to debug applications at the bytecode-level, and a dynamic taint analysis based approach for correlating inbound with outbound network packets.