AndroWasm: an Empirical Study on Android Malware Obfuscation through WebAssembly

Diego Soi

;Silvia Lucia Sanna;Lorenzo Pisu;Leonardo Regano;Giorgio Giacinto

2026-01-01

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Abstract

In recent years, stealthy Android malware has increasingly adopted sophisticated techniques to bypass automatic detection mechanisms and harden manual analysis. Adversaries typically rely on obfuscation, anti-repacking, steganography, poisoning, and evasion techniques to AI-based tools, and in-memory execution to conceal malicious functionality. In this paper, we investigate WebAssembly (Wasm) as a novel technique for hiding malicious payloads and evading traditional static analysis and signature-matching mechanisms. While Wasm is typically employed to render specific gaming activities and interact with the native components in web browsers, we provide an in-depth analysis on the mechanisms Android may employ to include Wasm modules in its execution pipeline. Additionally, we provide Proofs-of-Concept to demonstrate a threat model in which an attacker embeds and executes malicious routines, effectively bypassing IoC detection by industrial state-of-the-art tools, like VirusTotal and MobSF.