Reverse Engineering Proguarded-apk

Question

I have a task from my lecturer to do some reverse engineering. After doing some tutorials, I can reverse engineer basic APK file (with no proguard/dexguard).

My task is finished, but I'm getting curious now. I tried to search this on Google but nothing good/useful was found.

Is it possible to reverse engineering an APK with proguard and how to do it?

Edit (dont know why people are voting to close this question, so this is what i've done so far) :

I can reverse engineered a proguarded apk, but the variables are changed (which made my head hurts) :

  TextView I;
  EditText J;
  EditText K;
  EditText L;
  CheckBox M;

Can someone help me so i can perfectly reverse engineered it?

Is it possible? Sure. It's just more difficult since the code you get is harder for a human to read. — Michael, Feb 24 '14 at 13:16
@Michael do you mean something like my edited question? Can i perfectly reverse engineered it? Thanks — Blaze Tama, Feb 24 '14 at 13:23
you can try this link once but its not with Proguard. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3593420/android-getting-source-code-from-an-apk-file — Rajesh Mikkilineni, Feb 24 '14 at 13:26
I don't know what you mean by "perfectly reverse engineered". If you mean getting the original source code (the way it looked prior to obfuscation), then no, as far as I know you can't. But you can still reverse-engineer the code (i.e. figure out what it does and how it does it), but it will take more effort to do so. It sounds like you're confusing reverse-engineering with decompilation (they're not the same thing). — Michael, Feb 24 '14 at 13:36
You should tell your lecturer to behave himself and stop encouraging his students to infringe someone's copyright — NickT, Feb 24 '14 at 13:59
@NickT from my point of view, its okay because we dont use our skill to do something bad. I think learning is OK — Blaze Tama, Feb 25 '14 at 07:03

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 24 '14 at 13:24

it's possibile and obviously more difficult.

If it's your own .apk, or you have access to the project, then you can use the proguard mapping located here:

<project_root>/bin/proguard/mapping.txt

otherwise it's just more difficult and you'll need to get used to read and unserstand a lot of guarded bytecode. Defenetly not easy but possible if you, for instance, have an old version of the apk not guarded.

Reverse Engineering Proguarded-apk

1 Answers1