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

What is data storage?


Android uses Unix like file systems to store the data locally, there are a dozen or so file systems in use on Android like FAT32, EXT, and so on.

As everything in Android is a file, we can view the details of the file system in /proc/filesytems by using the following command:

C:\> adb shell cat /proc/filesystems

A typical root file system is shown in the following screenshot:

Android stores lots of details on filesystems like native apps, apps installed via the Play Store, and so on, and anyone with physical access to the device can easily glean lots of sensitive information like photos, passwords, GPS locations, browser history, and/or corporate data.

The app creators should store the data securely and failing to do so, will have adverse effects on the users, data, and can lead to serious attacks.

Let's briefly delve into the important directories on the file system and understand their importance:

  • /data: Stores app data, /data/data is used to store the app related...