A day in the life of a mobile reverse engineer
summary
Shows how Google Play Protect analyzes apps at scale: visibility to ~2 billion devices, >50 billion installs checked and over a million APKs analyzed daily, combining static and dynamic analysis, signature and machine learning scoring. Demonstrates practical tools like APKTool and CyberChef, decompilers and native debugging, and walks through a real multi‑stage packer that drops an APK and a native keep‑alive executable while using emulator and debugger checks to evade analysis. Explains which signals matter and which automated checks miss.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction and speaker intro
- 3:01Why we review mobile apps
- 4:48App collection sources
- 7:39Static vs dynamic analysis
- 9:46Scoring and machine learning
- 12:30Manual reverse engineering basics
- 16:49Where to start reversing
- 18:36Common obfuscation techniques
- 24:13Handling complex obfuscation
- 26:03Real-world malware example
- 29:12Final advice and closing
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