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

Determining application attack surfaces


During your application security assessments, you may want to know what the attack surface of a given application is. drozer has a really neat module that helps you determine just that. In terms of this module, the attack surface for an application is simply the number of exported components.

How to do it...

Execute the following command from your drozer console:

dz> app.package.attacksurface [package name]

This command will list all the exported activities for a given package as determined by the package manager API.

As an example, you could try running it against a sample package as follows:

How it works…

Let's take a look at the app.package.attacksurface module code. I think this is probably one of the most interesting modules, and walking through its code should spark some ideas on how to write automated testing tools in the form of applications. It will most certainly come in handy when you want to do mass automated application scanning!

The code...