ViaLab Community Edition is another free tool developed and released by NowSecure. It is shipped as a standalone virtual machine and can be found at https://www.nowsecure.com/apptesting/community/ (registration is required). The VM is actually very similar to the Santoku download, which we discussed at the beginning of this chapter, but includes the ViaLab Community Edition tool.
Tip
ViaLab requires the examiner's computer to have an Internet connection, in order to use the tool.
The main purpose of ViaLab is to analyze the behavior of an APK, although many of the features to do so are unavailable in the free Community Edition. ViaLab allows you to either manually load an APK file into the Android emulator or run the application on a rooted device. For our example, we manually loaded the APK file for Kik into the Android emulator. We chose Kik because it was analyzed thoroughly in Chapter 7, Forensic Analysis of Android Applications, so we had a good idea of what to...