APKiD gives you information about how an APK was made. It identifies many compilers, packers, obfuscators, and other weird stuff. It's PEiD for Android.
For more information on what this tool can be used for, check out our HITCON 2016 presentation: Android Compiler Fingerprinting.
The yara-python clone and compile steps here are temporarily necessary because we must point directly to our modified version of a yara branch which includes our DEX Yara module. This step is nessecary until (if?) the original maintainers of yara merge our module into the master branch. When this happens, we will undate the instructions here. After the yara-python fork is compiled, you can use pip
to the most currently published APKiD
package.
git clone https://github.com/rednaga/yara-python
cd yara-python
python setup.py install
pip install apkid
usage: apkid [-h] [-j] [-t TIMEOUT] FILE [FILE ...]
APKiD - Android Application Identifier
positional arguments:
FILE apk, dex, or dir
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-j, --json output results in JSON
-t TIMEOUT, --timeout TIMEOUT
Yara scan timeout in seconds
If you come across an APK or DEX that apkid does not recognize, please open a GitHub issue and tell us:
- what you think it is
- the file hash (either MD5, SHA1, SHA256)
We are open to any type of concept you might have for "something interesting" to detect, so do not limit yourself solely to packers, compilers or obfuscators. If there is an interesting anti disassembler, anti vm, anti* trick, please make an issue.
You're also welcome to submit pull requests, just be sure to include a file hash so we can check the rule.
This tool is available under a dual license: a commercial one suitable for closed source projects and a GPL license that can be used in open source software.
Depending on your needs, you must choose one of them and follow its policies. A detail of the policies and agreements for each license type are available in the LICENSE.COMMERCIAL and LICENSE.GPL files.
First you will need to install the specific version of yara-python the project depends on (more information about this in the Installing section):
git clone https://github.com/rednaga/yara-python
cd yara-python
python setup.py install
Then, clone this repo, compile the rules, and install the package in editable mode:
git clone https://github.com/rednaga/APKiD
cd APKiD
pip install -e .[dev]
./prep-release.py
If the above doesn't work, due to permission errors dependant on your local machine and where Python has been installed, try specifying the --user
flag. This is likely needed if you are working on OSX:
pip install -e .[dev] --user