Book Image

Android Security Cookbook

Book Image

Android Security Cookbook

Overview of this book

Android Security Cookbook discusses many common vulnerabilities and security related shortcomings in Android applications and operating systems. The book breaks down and enumerates the processes used to exploit and remediate these vulnerabilities in the form of detailed recipes and walkthroughs. The book also teaches readers to use an Android Security Assessment Framework called Drozer and how to develop plugins to customize the framework. Other topics covered include how to reverse-engineer Android applications to find common vulnerabilities, and how to find common memory corruption vulnerabilities on ARM devices. In terms of application protection this book will show various hardening techniques to protect application components, the data stored, secure networking. In summary, Android Security Cookbook provides a practical analysis into many areas of Android application and operating system security and gives the reader the required skills to analyze the security of their Android devices.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Android Security Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Inspecting the AndroidManifest.xml file


The application manifest is probably the most important source of information for Android application security specialists. It contains all of the information regarding an application's permissions and which components form part of an application, and it gives us quite some details about how these components will be allowed to interact with the rest of the applications on your platform. I'm going to use this recipe as a good excuse to talk about the application manifest, how it's structured, and what each component in the sample manifest means.

Getting ready

Before you can get going, you will need to have the following software:

  • WinZip for Windows

  • The Java JDK

  • A handy text editor; usually Vi/Vim does the trick, but Emacs, Notepad++, and Notepad are all cool; we don't need anything fancy here

  • The Android SDK (no surprise here!)

You may also need to go get something called apktool; it makes decoding the AndroidManifest.xml file really easy. Well, actually...