Android Assets Protection Using RSA and AES Cryptography to Prevent App Piracy
Afrig Aminuddin
Abstract
Android is the major operating system for mobile devices. The presence of the Google Play Store creates an ecosystem between the app developers and users. As the ecosystem grows, some pirated apps start to show up. This is possible due to the nature of the Android Application that easily can be extracted and decompiled to reveal the source code and the assets file. This research proposed a methodology to protect the application assets from piracy using the cryptographic algorithm. The assets are encrypted during the compile-time using the Gradle build system provided by the Android Studio. While the decryption is performed in the Android device during the application run-time. The proposed algorithm is the pair of asymmetric algorithm called RSA and the symmetric algorithm called AES. This research shows that RSA-AES gives the best security in protecting the assets of Android applications. Besides, the performance of the algorithm is evaluated based on the speed of the encryption and decryption that reach 106.82 MB/s and 44.42 MB/s respectively.