App security firm Digital.ai demo shows AI can reconstruct packed app structure in two minutes, proposes new dynamic defenses

Digital.ai, a company specializing in application security, along with its Taiwan distributor Ruiyang Information Technology, demonstrated in Taipei how AI significantly accelerates app reverse engineering. Pil Park, Digital.ai's Asia-Pacific Security Sales Engineer, explained that his team used Anthropic's Claude model to test a lightly packed Android app. The AI reconstructed a parseable DEX file structure—the format storing compiled code in Android—via static analysis in approximately two minutes.

Although the initial analysis showed the structure could be rebuilt, subsequent checks revealed that 17,179 method bodies in the two DEX files still lacked actual executable code, indicating that while AI can parse the structure, it does not fully restore the code. To address the missing content, the team performed a Memory Dump during app execution. In a cold-start test scenario, they obtained a DEX file containing complete method bodies in just 34 seconds.

Park noted that this process reveals that traditional packing and partial encryption may still leave plaintext clues exploitable by AI. He recommended that enterprises adopt Class Encryption to increase the difficulty of static analysis and strengthen code obfuscation to protect critical logic. Additionally, Digital.ai proposed a new mechanism called NativeFail, which triggers crashes at the Native layer to reduce exposure of Java stack traces, and a dynamic defense strategy combining Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) with server-side risk decision-making to counter attackers predicting fixed defensive responses.