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

Basics of Android apps

Every app that we download and install from the Play Store or any other source has the extension .apk. These APK files are compressed archive files, which contain other files and folders that we will discuss in a moment. Typically, the end users download these apps and install them by accepting the required permissions and then use them. Let's dive into the technical details such as what these apps contain and how they are actually packaged, what happens when we install them, and so on.

Android app structure

First let's start with the final binary that we use as an end user. As mentioned earlier, Android apps have the extension .APK (short for Android Application Package), which is an archive of various files and folders. This is typically what an end user or a penetration tester would get. Since an Android app is an archive file, we can uncompress it using any traditional extraction tool. The following diagram shows the folder structure of an uncompressed...