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

Introduction


Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is one of the core parts of encrypted communications between a client and a server. Its primary deployment has been for web browsers to encrypt messages and ascertain a level of trust with a third-party service for online transactions, such as buying a DVD or Internet banking. Unlike web browsers, there is no padlock icon in the left corner of an Android app providing a visual indicator that the connection is secure. Unfortunately, there have been instances where this validation has been skipped by app developers. This was highlighted by the paper, Why Eve and Mallory Love Android: An Analysis of Android SSL (In)Security (http://www2.dcsec.uni-hannover.de/files/android/p50-fahl.pdf).

In this chapter, we are going to look at some of the common pitfalls of using SSL on Android, specifically relating to self-signed certifications. The main focus is how to make SSL stronger to help guard against some of the vulnerabilities noted in the previous chapter...