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

What is rooting?


Android is built on top of Linux Kernel. In Unix based machines such as Linux, we see two types of user accounts – normal user accounts and root accounts. Normal user accounts usually have low privileges and they need permission from root to perform privileged operations such as installing tools, making changes to the Operating System, and so on. Whereas root accounts have all the privileges such as applying updates, installing software tools, ability to run any command, and so on. Essentially, this account has granular control over the whole system. This privilege separation model is one of the core Linux security features.

As mentioned earlier, Android is an operating system built on top of Linux Kernel. So many features that we see in traditional Linux systems will also be present in Android devices. Privilege separation is one among them. When you buy a brand new Android device, technically you are not the owner of your device, meaning you will have limited control over...