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

Launching activities


Activities are the application components that facilitate user interaction. It may be useful during an application security assessment to find out which applications can be launched without permissions in case any of them provide access to sensitive data or cause an application to crash if launched in the wrong context. Besides the obvious benefit of engaging with activities via the drozer console, it makes for a good responsive introduction to engage with application components because you can actually see your Android device respond to your commands from the terminal. So, without further ado, let's get cracking with some activities!

How to do it...

You will need to choose an activity to launch, but seeing that you cannot inherently know where the launchable activities are or what they're called, I thought I'd include the process of finding a launchable activity in this recipe.

  1. Find some activities using the app.activity.info module:

    dz> run app.activity.info –-package...