User-Side Updating of Third-Party Libraries for Android Applications

Abstract

A Third-Party Library(TPL) is often used in developing Android applications, however older TPLs may have vulnerabilities. Hence developers need to keep them in their applications the latest version. Nevertheless, there is a lot of applications using older TPLs. In this paper, we propose a new method which users enable to update TPLs in Android applications. An Android application and TPLs can be converted to smali file which is more of an assembly based language. A smali file can be replaced with another smali file on the same class. Our method takes advantage of its properties and exchanges a vulnerable TPL for an security fixed one. Moreover, we apply it to real applications and evaluate feasibility of it.