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

WebView attacks


WebView is a view that allows an application to load web pages within it. Internally it uses web rendering engines such as Webkit. The Webkit rendering engine was used prior to Android version 4.4 to load these web pages. On the latest versions (after 4.4) of Android, it is done using Chromium. When an application uses a WebView, it is run within the context of the application, which has loaded the WebView. To load external web pages from the Internet, the application requires INTERNET permission in its AndroidManifest.xml file:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"></uses-permission>

Using WebView in an Android app may pose different risks to the application depending upon the mistakes the developers make.

Accessing sensitive local resources through file scheme

When an Android application uses a WebView with user controlled input values to load web pages, it is possible that users can also read files from the device in the context of the target...