New Mobile Doctor for Free

Dear Doctors,
For all you, who bought (or Buy) our AppStore Application 'Mobile Doctor'  until 30 May 2012,

we offer you for FREE the new version of the Mobile Doctor.

Please send us the receipt of your buy and we will send you the FULL APPLICATION WITHOUT ANY CHARGE.

Also we found 3 negative reviews of the mobile Doctor out of more than 150 unit sold. Please contact us to resolve your problems or satisfy your requests. Our goal is Zero dissatisfied customers.

Vergas Dimitris

dvergas@advent.com.gr

Reverse Engineering - Android APK

There's nothing really complex about this post. In the past I've always maintained that reversing is kind of tough; and that's true if its an EXE,DLL etc. But in the case of an Android application; it really is very easy.

While all this information is already there, here is a very short blog post summarizing how you get from APK to Source. I used a Vuln app available here; but you can use anything really. Here goes:

1. Extract the APK to a folder. Its just a Zip file so any archiving program should do; I use the inbuilt Ubuntu GUI archiving tool.

2. Rename the folder to something like original_helloworld. That's because we will play around with all the files inside  and it might be nice to have an original copy somewhere to look at when needed.

3. Look at the file AndroidManifest.xml. It'll open in a Text editor but its largely binary; hence unreadable. Use Apktool to decode this XML file as well as every other XML file in the APK. You can get it from http://code.google.com/p/android-apktool/. Download the main apktool package (contains a JAR) and the platform specific one as well (contains the apktool binary). Run apktool . It'll run and give you all the XML files totally decoded; so you can now read them.

4. You now want to recover code. All code is in classes.dex. Think of Dex as Android Byte code which is reversible to Java Byte Code....which eventually is reversible
to Java code. So we first 'dedex'. You can either use the output of apktool above; which after running gives you its output in a folder called 'smali'. A slightly more
 'easy to read' format is given by dedexer though (less spaces; cleaner output) available at http://dedexer.sourceforge.net. You use it as follows to 'dedex' classes.d
ex - java -jar ddx1.22.jar -d /opt/Android/vulnapps/Tmp_test_apps/InsecureBankDeDexed /opt/Android/vulnapps/Tmp_test_apps/InsecureBank.apk_FILES/classes.dex. Look inside InsecureBankDeDexed for the output. So in a nutshell, after we DeDex we get Android Byte code.

5. Once you have Android byte code; since Android code 'looks' very much like Java, you can convert Android byte code to Java byte code. Use dex2jar downloaded from
http://code.google.com/p/dex2jar/ and run it as follows ./dex2jar.sh ../../vulnapps/Tmp_test_apps/InsecureBank.apk. This results in a JAR file getting created in the d
irectory where the APK is already present. The JAR file contains all the JAVA class files; namely the Java byte code - something that you get once you compile your Jav
a code.

6. The last step is to convert your Java byte code into actual Java code. You need something called a Java decompiler for this. You can download one called the Jd-Gui from here - http://java.decompiler.free.fr/?q=jdgui. Once its downloaded, unzip the JAR and store all its class files in a single folder like JavaClassFiles. Launch JD-GUI and select 1 class file. Save the source. Repeat for each class file [Painful I know :(]. You now have all the source code and can do some static analysis on the code :). There's probably some cooler way to decompile all the class files in a folder; but I won't dig too deep into that just now.

Largely this presentation was where I got almost everything from. Will write more when I do some static analysis.

Market app - Android 2.2

Was doing a test on an Android app (first ever ;)) and was trying to install an app which was available on Android market. As it turns out, the emulator doesn't have the app pre-installed. So I followed instructions here. That largely works except that despite following everything the app vanishes the next time around. So after more digging I came up on this thread which provided the missing piece. I'll sum it up quickly.

--- You need to edit files on the emulator which will prevent the emulator from checking if its a valid phone or not
--- You need to upload the packages for the Market app and the GoogleServicesFramework as those are not shipped
--- You can do both of the above only if you have WRITE access to the emulator's system directory.

So far everything is covered by Varun's blog. The 1 point which he hasn't made clear is that once you've pushed all your changes to build.prop, uploaded the 2 apps mentioned above and deleted SdkSetup.apk you have to sync your changes and save the temp image in which all these changes are made.

Think of it in this way..all the changes you make are temporary and made in a file /tmp/android-. The filename starts with emulator. Once you're done making your changes save this file somewhere. Shut the emulator down. Now rename the saved file to system.img and copy it into ~/.android/avd/.avd. Now boot the emulator. It should work.

I've said nothing new frankly. If you use Varun's post and the post on the XDA forums together, you will be able to do this. However I was stuck for quite a while here, so thought a few guys would benefit by me linking the two together :)

Blogging elsewhere for a bit

I've been blogging at Infosec Institute (a little :)) and on the TeamMentor development blog (a lot) ... so that's why this isn't as updated with my experiences. Do peek at my work at II or on TeamMentor if you're interested in knowing what I am up to :)