Col-E
Expand search API to eventually support Android
The search API is heavily tied to the ASM library, which parses Java class files. Android classes are packaged into a single DEX which we parse using dexlib2.
The API will have to also be able to parse these Android classes and offer the same functionality.
Copying a suggestion from the discord below:
Well. JADX-Gui is great. But yeah JADX-Gui only works in combination with at least Notepad++ and APK-Tool. You will need at least 3 tools. I am modding GCam and I use 6 Tools: APK-Tool, JADX-Gui, Notepad++, Android Studio, WinMerge and BytecodeViewer. Recaf would make many things much easier for Android Reverse engineering. It is complete pain rn. Things I need for AndroidRE are:
- Usage Search (Search where Methods are used in the APK via rightclickmenu)
- Logcat Window via USB with adb
- APK-Support (Decompilation and Compilation)
- Comparing of different APKs (Compare Versions of Code even if class names changed)
- Ressources Previews (Images, oggs, Vectorimagefiles, Vectorxml-files, XMLs, ... )
- Ressource generation (Import vector images, import pngs, import oggs, ... )
- Edit Ressources (Delete XMLs, Images, ... ; Edit XMLs)
- Different Decompilers
- Install compiled apk directly via adb
- Start installed app via adb shell
To give a short list, some of that is already in Recaf. Then there would only be one case where you need a second Software and thats with binaries. So maybe it would be helpful to in- and export .so-files. You need Ghidra, cutter or IDA for that. But thats really advanced stuff.
It's also possible, that the classes are packed into multiple Dex-Files. That already caused bugs for Dex2Jar fixed with version 23. https://github.com/ThexXTURBOXx/dex2jar/releases/tag/v23
https://developer.android.com/studio/build/multidex
In 4x we've generalized the search logic quite a bit, so this is much easier to implement now. We even have some basic skeletons of the Android work done.