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

Debugging the Android processes using the GDB server


Debugging processes via some GDB-like tool is what most memory corruption, buffer overflow, and malware analysis jockeys do every day. Inspecting memory and performing dynamic analysis of an application process is something fundamental to any reverse engineer no matter what platform you're focused on; this, of course, includes Android. The following recipe shows you how to debug a process running on an Android device using GDB.

Getting ready

In order to pull off this recipe, you'll need to grab the following:

How to do it...

To debug a live Android process using gdbserver, you will need to perform the following steps:

  1. The first step is to make sure that you either have a rooted Android device or an up-and-running emulator. I'm not going to detail the entire process of setting up an emulator here, but if you're not clear on the details...