Book Image

Hacking Android

By : Srinivasa Rao Kotipalli
Book Image

Hacking Android

By: Srinivasa Rao Kotipalli

Overview of this book

With the mass explosion of Android mobile phones in the world, mobile devices have become an integral part of our everyday lives. Security of Android devices is a broad subject that should be part of our everyday lives to defend against ever-growing smartphone attacks. Everyone, starting with end users all the way up to developers and security professionals should care about android security. Hacking Android is a step-by-step guide that will get you started with Android security. You’ll begin your journey at the absolute basics, and then will slowly gear up to the concepts of Android rooting, application security assessments, malware, infecting APK files, and fuzzing. On this journey you’ll get to grips with various tools and techniques that can be used in your everyday pentests. You’ll gain the skills necessary to perform Android application vulnerability assessment and penetration testing and will create an Android pentesting lab.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Hacking Android
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding app sandboxing


In all our previous sections, we have discussed how apps are built and run in detail. Once the app is installed on the device, how does it look like on the file system? What are the security controls enforced by Google to make sure that our app's data is safe from other applications running on the device? This section will discuss all these concepts in detail.

UID per app

Android is built on top of Linux Kernel and the user separation model of Linux is also applicable to Linux but slightly different from traditional Linux. First let's see how UID is assigned to processes running on traditional Linux machines.

I have logged into my Kali Linux machine as user root and running two processes:

  • Iceweasel

  • Gedit

Tip

Now, if we look at the User IDs of the above two processes, they run with the same UID root. To cross check, I am filtering the processes running with UID root by writing the following command:

ps -U root | grep 'iceweasel\|gedit'
ps -U root : Shows all the process...