Bulletproof Android™: Practical Advice for Building Secure Apps

DexGuard

One of the best descriptions on the different levels of obfuscation comes from Christian Collberg’s paper, “A Taxonomy of Obfuscating Transformations,” which you can find at https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/2292/3491/TR148.pdf. A Java list of obfuscation classifications from the paper can be found in Table 2-1.

Table 2-1 Taxonomy of Obfuscations

There are four major categories of obfuscation: layout, control, data, and preventative. We’ve already seen a good example where the identifiers have been scrambled, which ...