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

Decompiling DEX files


DEX files, or Dalvik Executable files, are the Android equivalent of Java's CLASS files. They include the compiled format of the Java code that defines an Android application's behavior, and as an Android security specialist to be, you would naturally be interested in knowing how these files work and what exactly they are for. Decompiling the DEX files is an essential part of the security assessments for many applications; they provide a good source of information on the behavior of an Android application and can often glean details of an application's development that a pure source code perspective cannot. A good understanding of the DEX file format and how to interpret it may lead to the identification of new vulnerabilities or development and improvement of exploits against the Android platform and Dalvik VM. Malware may soon start exploiting the way DEX files are interpreted, to hide details pertaining to its behavior. And the only security enthusiast that will...