ApkDiffer: Accurate and Scalable Cross-Version Diffing Analysis for Android Applications
summary
Builds and open-sources ApkDiffer, a method-level Android diffing tool that splits each app into two-stage decomposition of event-driven functionality units and runs a three-stage alignment: anchoring, refining with edge similarity, and expanding to recover refactors and one-to-many matches. Evaluation on benchmarks shows precision gains of about 4–35% and recall gains of 16–64% versus four baselines; analysis of 100 apps over one year finds 70% of privacy-collection changes stem from functionality updates, and average analysis time is nine minutes per app.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (6)
- 0:00APKDiffer introduction
- 1:05Method alignment as graph matching
- 3:29Scalability via graph composition
- 5:16Three-stage method alignment
- 7:45Evaluation against baselines
- 10:20Q&A
related talks
27mDiffusing Changes in your APK
36mAdvanced Android app shrinking techniques
29mBytecode analysis for everyone!
25mConsiderate App Update Delivery
45mBreak your app before someone else does
30mA day in the life of a mobile reverse engineer
44mAuditing Your APKs Like a Black Hat Hacker
34mCan your diff(1) do this?! Improving software review and QA with diffoscope