quark-engine
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Quark-Engine is a mobile security analysis framework that detects malicious behaviors in Android applications through rule-based pattern matching.
quark --core-library androguard -a <sample.apk> quark -a <sample.apk> --core-library shuriken quark --version quark -i <apk_path> quark --confidence-level high
Summary
quark-engine is an open-source (GPLv3) command-line tool that analyzes suspicious Android APK files by loading their Dalvik bytecode and scoring behaviors against a rule set to calculate a threat level within seconds. It's aimed at malware analysts and reverse engineers who need to triage Android samples rather than disassemble them by hand, and it ships with rule sets and published analysis reports for named families like Cerberus, SharkBot, Godfather, and TrickMo. Beyond static rule matching, it can resolve obfuscated strings at runtime through an optional dynamic-analysis mode, repair APKs with mismatched checksums automatically, and generate web-based reports; a Quark Agent extension adds natural-language queries over results. First committed in 2019 and maintained by 45 contributors, it remains active with 156 commits in the past year and a release just 50 days ago.
Quark-Engine is a mobile security analysis framework that detects malicious behaviors in Android applications through rule-based pattern matching.
How quark-engine helps
Is this APK sample worth escalating, or safe to triage away?
scores the sample's behaviors against the rule set and returns a threat level within seconds, without needing to disassemble it by hand
Which known malware family does this sample most resemble?
matches its behaviors against published rule sets for named families like Cerberus, SharkBot, Godfather, and TrickMo and reports the closest match
Can I still get a verdict on an APK whose checksum doesn't match what's expected?
auto-repairs the mismatched checksum during parsing so analysis proceeds without manual intervention
Is this sample hiding its real behavior behind obfuscated strings?
runs an optional dynamic-analysis mode that executes the encrypted string methods at analysis time to recover the plaintext for rule matching
What exactly triggered the threat score on this sample?
generates a web-based report showing which rules fired and lets a natural-language agent extension be queried over the results for follow-up questions
Will a larger or more complex sample still finish analysis in a constrained environment?
records register usage instead of full register state to cut memory use, and can process semi-corrupted APKs that previously failed to analyze
Languages
Command line
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Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for quark-engine, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail quark-engine puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
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Coverage
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What quark-engine connects to, runs on and detects, read from its release notes and docs. So far: 1 new detection.
1 change, tracked since Oct 10, 2026.
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Oct 102026
new Malware analysis reports for Exodus, RuMMS, and Dendroid
Add Quark malware analysis reports for Exodus, RuMMS, and Dendroid. (#976, #974, and #973)
Nothing first seen in this window. That doesn't mean quark-engine shipped nothing, only that we found no record of it.
How we count
Read from 1 of 48 release notes and docs updates we hold for quark-engine. "First seen" is the earliest note that names something; "last" is the latest. Our history may start partway through quark-engine's life, so an old integration can show a recent first-seen date.
Each change counts once: "added 40 checks" is one line, so the numbers measure how often coverage moves, not how big the catalogue is or how well it detects.
Releases
48 entries
No entries match these filters.
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- November 20191
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in ev-flow/quark-engine, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 12 +7 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 3 +3 joined · −2 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 2 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 52% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 4.3 days first maintainer reply 4.4 days
- Open backlog 56 of 317 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 56
- Contributors / month 3
- Commits / month 5
- Stars 1,723
- bugs 11%
- docs 3%
- other 86%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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