Ruben’s main interests lie in programming language design and compilers. He has a PhD in the field of domain-specific languages in functional programming. Currently he is part of the DexGuard team at Guardsquare. DexGuard is a dex recompiler aimed at providing resilience against reverse engineering for Android applications.
Ruben Pieters
Compiler Engineer
Impact of framework choice on your application: A reverse engineering perspective
When developing an app you are faced with a difficult choice: which framework will you use to develop it? You can find evaluations of these frameworks containing their various pros and cons online. In this talk we want to dive a bit deeper into this topic by taking a reverse engineer's perspective: inspect and analyze the actual bundled application when using different frameworks.
From this perspective, we will ask ourselves several questions related to the framework choice. What impact does the shared framework code have, does it meaningfully impact the overall app size or performance? If the framework allows you to write code in non-JVM based code, where does that end up and how is this code executed in the app? Are there any obvious differences in security caused by a choice of framework?
During this talk you will:
- Learn the basics of some common Android reverse engineering tools
- See the usage of such tools on several different framework applications
- Learn about the difference in several Android frameworks (Flutter, React, ..) from this reverse engineering perspective
- Learn what conclusions can be made on typical metrics these frameworks are compared by from this perspective