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

Securing application components


Application components can be secured both by making proper use of the AndroidManifest.xml file and by forcing permission checks at code level. These two factors of application security make the permissions framework quite flexible and allow you to limit the number of applications accessing your components in quite a granular way.

There are many measures that you can take to lock down access to your components, but what you should do before anything else is make sure you understand the purpose of your component, why you need to protect it, and what kind of risks your users face should a malicious application start firing off intents to your app and accessing its data. This is called a risk-based approach to security, and it is suggested that you first answer these questions honestly before configuring your AndroidManifest.xml file and adding permission checks to your apps.

In this recipe, I have detailed some of the measures that you can take to protect generic...