Book Image

Hacking Android

By : Srinivasa Rao Kotipalli
Book Image

Hacking Android

By: Srinivasa 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 (17 chapters)
Hacking Android
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Locked and unlocked boot loaders


A boot loader is the first program that runs when you boot your device. Boot loader takes care and initiates your hardware and Android kernel. Without this program, our device doesn't boot. Those manufacturers of your devices usually write boot loaders and so usually they are locked. This ensures that the end users cannot make any changes to the device firmware. To run custom images on your device, boot loader has to be unlocked first before we proceed with it. Even when you want to root a device with a locked boot loader, it requires unlocking it first if there is a possible and available way to do it. Some manufacturers provide an official method to unlock boot loader. In the next section, we will see how to unlock a boot loader on Sony devices. If the boot loader cannot be unlocked, we will have to find a flaw that allows us to root the device.

Determining boot loader unlock status on Sony devices

As mentioned earlier, some manufacturers provide an official...