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

Building DEX files from the command line

DEX files without a doubt are one of the most important parts of an Android app, which is often useful for an attacker or penetration tester. We will have to deal with DEX files a lot in the Reverse Engineering section of this book. So, let's see how these DEX files are created during the app building process. We are going to do it from the command line so that it is better understandable as we can have a close look at each step.

The following diagram shows the high level process of how .dex files are generated:

Building DEX files from the command line

The first step is to write a simple Java program in order to start with the process. The following piece of Java code simply prints the word Hacking Android on the output console:

public class HackingAndroid{

  Public static void main(String[] args){

  System.out.println("Hacking Android");

}

}

Save this file as HackingAndroid.java.

Now we need to compile this Java file. The initial compilation process of Java code written for...