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

Backup techniques


All of our examples and demos so far, were on rooted devices. Some of our readers might argue that not many devices are rooted and there isn't much we can do for non-rooted devices

In this section, we will see how we can examine the internal memory of apps on non-rooted devices using the backup feature. Taking backup of a specific app or the device allows us to examine it for security issues.

We will use WhatsApp lock as our target app for this demo; this is the same application we used during the shared preferences section:

C:\ >adb pull /data/data/com.whatsapplock/shared_prefs/ com.whatsapplock_preferences.xml
failed to copy '/data/data/com.whatsapplock/shared_prefs/ com.whatsapplock_preferences.xml' to 'com.whatsapplock_preferences.xml': Permission denied

As you can see, we get the permission denied error, as our adb is not running as root.

Now let's use the backup technique of android to find security issues by following these steps:

  1. Backup the app data using the adb...