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Learning Pentesting for Android Devices

By : Aditya Gupta
Book Image

Learning Pentesting for Android Devices

By: Aditya Gupta

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Learning Pentesting for Android Devices
Aditya Gupta
Mar, 2014 | 154 pages
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Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning Pentesting for Android Devices
Learning Pentesting for Android Devices
Credits
Credits
Foreword
Foreword
About the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with Android Security
Getting Started with Android Security
Introduction to Android
Digging deeper into Android
Sandboxing and the permission model
Application signing
Android startup process
Summary
2
Preparing the Battlefield
Preparing the Battlefield
Setting up the development environment
Useful utilities for Android Pentest
Summary
3
Reversing and Auditing Android Apps
Reversing and Auditing Android Apps
Android application teardown
Reversing an Android application
Using Apktool to reverse an Android application
Auditing Android applications
Content provider leakage
Insecure file storage
OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities for mobiles
Summary
4
Traffic Analysis for Android Devices
Traffic Analysis for Android Devices
Android traffic interception
Ways to analyze Android traffic
HTTPS Proxy interception
Extracting sensitive files with packet capture
Summary
5
Android Forensics
Android Forensics
Types of forensics
Filesystems
Using dd to extract data
Using Andriller to extract an application's data
Using AFLogical to extract contacts, calls, and text messages
Dumping application databases manually
Logging the logcat
Using backup to extract an application's data
Summary
6
Playing with SQLite
Playing with SQLite
Understanding SQLite in depth
Security vulnerability
Summary
7
Lesser-known Android Attacks
Lesser-known Android Attacks
Android WebView vulnerability
Infecting legitimate APKs
Vulnerabilities in ad libraries
Cross-Application Scripting in Android
Summary
8
ARM Exploitation
ARM Exploitation
Introduction to ARM architecture
Setting up the environment
Simple stack-based buffer overflow
Return-oriented programming
Android root exploits
Summary
9
Writing the Pentest Report
Writing the Pentest Report
Basics of a penetration testing report
Writing the pentest report
Summary
Security Audit of
Table of Contents
1.
2. Auditing and Methodology
3. Conclusions
Index
Index

Reversing an Android application

As we discussed earlier, that Android applications are simply an archive file of data and resources. Even then, we can't simply unzip the archive package (.apk) and get the readable sources. For these scenarios, we have to rely on tools that will convert the byte code (as in classes.dex) into readable source code.

One of the approaches to convert byte codes to readable files is using a tool called dex2jar. The .dex file is the converted Java bytecode to Dalvik bytecode, making it optimized and efficient for mobile platforms. This free tool simply converts the .dex file present in the Android application to a corresponding .jar file. Please follow the ensuing steps:

  1. Download the dex2jar tool from https://code.google.com/p/dex2jar/.

  2. Now we can use it to run against our application's .dex file and convert to .jar format.

  3. Now, all we need to do is go to the command prompt and navigate to the folder where dex2jar is located. Next, we need to run the d2j-dex2jar.bat...

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