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

Passive intent sniffing via the activity manager


A good way to proliferate information about application and their components is to eavesdrop on inter-application communication. One way you could do this is by requesting information about the most recent intents from the activity manager.

This is pretty straightforward and, as it turns out, can be done via drozer (which was introduced in Chapter 3, Android Security Assessment Tools) if you're willing to do some Python scripting. The folks at iSec Partners have developed an Android application that is capable of doing this, and most of the inspiration for the drozer module discussed in the following recipe comes from their app. To find out how to get your hands on this app see the See also section of this recipe.

Getting ready

Before we actually write this module, we need to modify the drozer Agent a little so it has the required permissions to actually request information about intents from the activity manager. The simplest way to do this...