Asia Pacific University Library catalogue

A project submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation for the degree of BSc. (Hons) in Information Technology with specialism in Information System Security (UC3F1711IT(ISS)).

Nowadays, the code tampering attack or repackaging attack has become common on he desktop application especially in Java application. This attack used by attacker to modify the source code of a legitimate Java application available online with malicious code, recompile it and publish on web and pretend as a legitimate application. Once victim installs the modified or malicious application and use it, the attacker might steal the sensitive information of the victim like personal details, credit card information, etc. The success rate of this attack is high because of low concern of the user about the developer and the code tampering risk; and there are too many sources online which could not have enforced with mandatory check like the App Store in iOS mobile environment. hence, the tamper-proofing techniques should be widely publicized and use by developers to ensure their product security. The tamper proofing technique is a further implementation of the source code of an application to increase the difficulty of the application. In this project, a Java source code obfuscation tool, "J-Shield"; will be proposed to provide assistance to the java application developer for implementing the tamper-proofing feature with their application developed in order to prevent the code tampering attack. The obfuscation feature is introduced with the multiple obfuscation techniques and algorithms. These techniques could modify the source code of Java application to reduce the readability and increase the difficulty of attacker to access and understand the structure and meaning of the application source code.