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

Bypassing screen locks

Just like most other devices, Android devices have got a screen lock mechanism to prevent unauthorized use of someone's device, as shown in the following screenshot:

Bypassing screen locks

Android devices usually have the following types of screen lock:

  • None: No screen lock
  • Slide: Move the slider to unlock the device
  • Pattern: Enter the right pattern connecting the dots to unlock the device
  • PIN: Enter the right number to unlock the device
  • Password: Enter the right password (characters) to unlock the device

As the first two types do not require any additional skills to bypass the screen lock, we will discuss some techniques available to bypass the other three types of screen lock.

Bypassing pattern lock using adb

Note

Note: This technique requires the device to be rooted and USB debugging must be enabled.

Pattern lock on Android devices is a type of screen lock where the user needs to connect the right combination of dots, as shown in the following screenshot:

Bypassing pattern lock using adb

We can imagine those dots with numbers...