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

Compiling from Java to DEX


The recipe following this one breaks down the DEX file format; but before delving into the DEX file, it would be useful to first get to know the process of interpreting/compiling a Java program into a DEX program. One of the key reasons for demonstrating compilation from Java to DEX is because the file used in the example here will be used to explain the DEX file format in the next recipe.

Getting ready

Before we get going, there are a couple of things you will need:

  • Java Development Kit: We need this to be able to compile Java code into the class files

  • Android SDK: We need some of the tools in this package to be able to transform Java class files into DEX files

  • Text editor: We need a text editor so that we can write a sample Java program to convert to a DEX program

Once you've got all of these things, we can begin preparing a sample DEX file.

How to do it...

To compile a Java program into a DEX program, you will need to do the following:

  1. Open your text editor and create...