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 the app's attack surface


When an application is developed, we need to consider enforcing security controls at each layer of the application's architecture.

Mobile application architecture

Mobile apps such as social networking, banking, and entertainment apps contain a lot of functionality that requires Internet communication, and so most of the mobile apps today have typical client-server architecture as shown in the diagram below. When understanding the attack surface for these kinds of apps, it is required to consider all the possibilities of the application, which includes the client application, API backend, server related vulnerabilities, and the database. An entry point at any of these places may cause a threat to the whole application/its data. For illustration, assume that we have an Android app connecting to its server using the backend API, which in turn interacts with its database:

It is recommended to follow the Secure SDLC process while developing software. Many organizations...