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

Removing all log messages with ProGuard


ProGuard is an open source Java code obfuscator that is supplied with the Android SDK. For those unfamiliar with obfuscators, they remove any information from the code that is not needed for execution, for example, unused code and debugging information. Also, identifiers are renamed from an easy-to-read, descriptive, and maintainable code you've written into an optimized, shorter, and very difficult-to-read one. Before, an object/method call might look something like this: SecurityManager.encrypt(String text);, but after obfuscation, it could look like: a.b(String c);. As you can see, it gives no clue about its purpose.

ProGuard also reduces the amount of code by removing unused methods, fields, and attributes, and makes it execute quicker by using machine-optimized code. This is ideal for a mobile context, as this optimization can drastically reduce the size of the exported .apk file. This is especially useful when only using a subset of third-party...