Book Image

Hacking Android

By : Mohammed A. Imran, Rao Kotipalli
Book Image

Hacking Android

By: Mohammed A. Imran, Rao Kotipalli

Overview of this book

With the mass explosion of Android mobile phones in the world, mobile devices have become an integral part of our everyday lives. Security of Android devices is a broad subject that should be part of our everyday lives to defend against ever-growing smartphone attacks. Everyone, starting with end users all the way up to developers and security professionals should care about android security. Hacking Android is a step-by-step guide that will get you started with Android security. You’ll begin your journey at the absolute basics, and then will slowly gear up to the concepts of Android rooting, application security assessments, malware, infecting APK files, and fuzzing. On this journey you’ll get to grips with various tools and techniques that can be used in your everyday pentests. You’ll gain the skills necessary to perform Android application vulnerability assessment and penetration testing and will create an Android pentesting lab.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Android Studio

The next tool to be installed is Android Studio. Android Studio is the official IDE for Android application development, based on IntelliJ IDEA. Eclipse used to be the IDE for Android Application development before Android Studio was introduced. Android Studio was in early access preview stage, starting with version 0.1 in May 2013, and then entered beta stage starting with version 0.8, which was released in June 2014. The first stable build was released in December 2014, starting with version 1.0.

Download and install Android Studio from the following link:

https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

  1. Download Android Studio and run the installer:
    Android Studio
  2. Click Next till the following window appears:
    Android Studio

    This window shows us the options for the tools to be installed. It is suggested you check all of them to install Android SDK, Android Virtual Device, and Intel@HAXM, which is used for hardware acceleration and necessary to run x86-based emulators with Android Studio.

  3. Agree to the License Agreement and proceed with the installation:
    Android Studio
  4. Choose the installation location for Android Studio and the Android SDK. If you don't have any specific choices, leave them to the default values. Please keep a note of the location of your Android SDK to add it to your system environment variables, so that we can access tools such as adb, sqlite3 client, and so on from anywhere on the command prompt:
    Android Studio
  5. Allocate the RAM based on your available system memory; however, a minimum of 2 GB is recommended:
    Android Studio
  6. The following step allows us to choose the name for Android Studio in the start menu. Again, you can leave it to the default value if you don't have any specific choice:
    Android Studio
  7. Continue the installation by clicking Next till the following screen appears. This finishes our Android Studio installation:
    Android Studio
  8. When you click Finish in the preceding window, the following screen will be shown. If you have installed an older version of Android Studio, choose its location to import your previous settings. If this is a fresh installation on this machine, choose I do not have a previous version of Studio or I do not want to import my settings:
    Android Studio
  9. Clicking the OK button will start Android Studio, as shown here:
    Android Studio
  10. Once it is loaded, we will be greeted with a window, where we need to choose the UI theme. Select one of the themes and click Next.
    Android Studio
  11. Clicking Next in the previous window will download the latest SDK components and the emulator, as shown in the following screenshot:
    Android Studio
  12. Finally, click Finish and you should be greeted with the following window. This completes our installation:
    Android Studio
  13. To create a new sample application, click Start a new Android Studio project:
    Android Studio
  14. Choose a name for your app under Application name. Let's name it HelloWorld. Also choose a sample company domain name. Let's name it test.com. Leave the other options to their defaults and click Next:
    Android Studio
  15. The following screen shows the Minimum SDK version for our app. We choose to make it API Level 15, as it supports a higher number of devices:
    Android Studio
  16. Select a Blank Activity, as shown here, and click Next:
    Android Studio
  17. You can choose a name for your activity if you wish. We will leave the options to their defaults:
    Android Studio
  18. Finally, click Finish to complete the setup. It will take some time to initialize the emulator and build our first Hello World app:
    Android Studio

Wait for all initialization to finish when you see the previous screen. In future chapters, we will see how this app is compiled and run in an emulator.