Apktool Android Reverse Engineering

About

The Apktool skill empowers Claude to perform deep security audits and reverse engineering of Android applications. It provides standardized workflows for decoding binary resources, extracting human-readable AndroidManifest.xml files, and disassembling Dalvik bytecode into smali format. This is an essential tool for penetration testers and IoT security researchers who need to identify hardcoded secrets, analyze app permissions, or understand the communication protocols between mobile apps and hardware devices.

Key Features

• 494 GitHub stars
• Extract and decode human-readable AndroidManifest.xml and resource files
• Disassemble DEX files into editable smali bytecode for code analysis
• Identify security misconfigurations like debuggable flags and exported components
• Automated searching for hardcoded API keys, URLs, and credentials in resources
• Support for repackaging and rebuilding modified APKs for security testing

Use Cases

• Reverse engineering proprietary application logic to understand internal API behaviors
• Auditing Android applications for insecure permissions and data storage vulnerabilities
• Analyzing IoT companion apps for hardcoded device endpoints and secrets