Book Image

Android Security Cookbook

Book Image

Android Security Cookbook

Overview of this book

Android Security Cookbook discusses many common vulnerabilities and security related shortcomings in Android applications and operating systems. The book breaks down and enumerates the processes used to exploit and remediate these vulnerabilities in the form of detailed recipes and walkthroughs. The book also teaches readers to use an Android Security Assessment Framework called Drozer and how to develop plugins to customize the framework. Other topics covered include how to reverse-engineer Android applications to find common vulnerabilities, and how to find common memory corruption vulnerabilities on ARM devices. In terms of application protection this book will show various hardening techniques to protect application components, the data stored, secure networking. In summary, Android Security Cookbook provides a practical analysis into many areas of Android application and operating system security and gives the reader the required skills to analyze the security of their Android devices.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Android Security Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Signing Android applications


All Android applications are required to be signed before they are installed on an Android device. Eclipse and other IDEs pretty much handle application signing for you; but for you to truly understand how application signing works, you should try your hand at signing an application yourself using the tools in the Java JDK and Android SDK.

First, a little background on application signing. Android application signing is simply a repurposing of the JAR signing. It has been used for years to verify the authenticity of Java class file archives. Android's APK files aren't exactly like JAR files and include a little more metadata and resources than JAR files; so, the Android team needed to gear the JAR signing to suit the APK file's structure. They did this by making sure that the extra content included in an Android application forms part of the signing and verification process.

So, without giving away too much about application signing, let's grab an APK file and...