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 SharedPreferences data


Android provides a simple framework for app developers to persistently store key-value pairs of primitive datatypes. This recipe illustrates a practical use of a pseudorandomly generated secret key and demonstrates the use of Secure-Preferences . It is an open source library that wraps the default Android SharedPreferences to encrypt the key-value pairs for protecting them against attackers. Secure-Preferences is compatible with Android 2.1+, and is licensed with Apache 2.0; hence, it is suitable for commercial development.

I should add that I'm the co-creator and maintainer of the Secure-Preferences library. A good alternative to Secure-Preferences is a library called Cwac-prefs that is backed by SQLCipher (covered in a later recipe).

Getting ready

Let's add the Secure-Preferences library.

  1. Download or clone Secure-Preferences from GitHub at https://github.com/scottyab/secure-preferences.

    The Secure-Preferences repository contains an Android library project and...