ApktoolLinuxAndroid Applications Reversing 1. Simone. Every day we see a bunch of new Android applications being published on the Google Play Store, from games, to utilities, to Io. T devices clients and so forth, almost every single aspect of our life can be somehow controlled with an app. The Hex Files Secrets Of The Six. We have smart houses, smart fitness devices and smart coffee machines but is this stuff just smart or is it secure as well Reversing an Android application can be a relatively easy and fun way to answer this question, thats why I decided to write this blog post where Ill try to explain the basics and give you some of my tricks to reverse this stuff faster and more effectively. Im not going to go very deep into technical details, you can learn yourself how Android works, how the Dalvik VM works and so forth, this is gonna be a very basic practical guide instead of a post full of theoretical stuff but no really useful contents. Lets start Prerequisites. JAVAJAR. In order to follow this introduction to APK reversing therere a few prerequisites A working brain I dont give this for granted anymore. An Android smartphone doh You have a basic knowledge of the Java programming language you understand it if you read it. You have the JRE installed on your computer. You have adb installed. You have the Developer Options and USB Debugging enabled on your smartphone. What is an APK An Android application is packaged as an APK Android Package file, which is essentially a ZIP file containing the compiled code, the resources, signature, manifest and every other file the software needs in order to run. Being it a ZIP file, we can start looking at its contents using the unzip command line utility or any other unarchiver you use unzip application. Heres what you will find inside an APK. Android. Manifest. This is the binary representation of the XML manifest file describing what permissions the application will request keep in mind that some of the permissions might be requested at runtime by the app and not declared here, what activities GUIs are in there, what services stuff running in the background with no UI and what receivers classes that can receive and handle system events such as the device boot or an incoming SMS. Once decompiled more on this later, itll look like this 1. Iris Pro WinMacLinux. I need to edit an Android app just to change some text that was written incorrectly. I have the. apk files, so how would I modify them JitPack makes it easy to release your Java or Android library. Publish straight from GitHub or Bitbucket. Exploring the reality behind Novell exclusionary deals with Microsoft and their subtle yet severe implications on Free software, open source and GNULinux. The truth. Build. Version. Code2. Build. Version. Name7. WRITEEXTERNALSTORAGE lt uses permissionandroid nameandroid. INTERNET lt applicationandroid allow. Backuptrueandroid iconmipmapiclauncherandroid labelstringappnameandroid supports. Rtltrueandroid themestyleApp. Theme lt activityandroid namecom. Main. Activity lt intent filter lt actionandroid nameandroid. MAIN lt categoryandroid nameandroid. BDFreak_Advanced_Apk_Tool_v2_0_0_1.png' alt='Apktool Linux' title='Apktool Linux' />LAUNCHER lt intent filter lt activity lt application lt manifest Keep in mind that this is the perfect starting point to isolate the application entry points, namely the classes youll reverse first in order to understand the logic of the whole software. In this case for instance, we would start inspecting the com. Main. Activity class being it declared as the main UI for the application. This folder will contain application specific files, like wav files the app might need to play, custom fonts and so on. Reversing wise its usually not very important, unless of course you find inside the software functional references to such files. All the resources, like the activities xml files, images and custom styles are stored here. This is the index of all the resources, long story short, at each resource file is assigned a numeric identifier that the app will use in order to identify that specific entry and the resources. This file contains the Dalvik the virtual machine running Android applications bytecode of the app, let me explain it better. An Android application is most of the times developed using the Java programming language. The java source files are then compiled into this bytecode which the Dalvik VM eventually will execute pretty much what happens to normal Java programs when theyre compiled to. Long story short, this file contains the logic, thats what were interested into. Sometimes youll also find a classes. DEX format which has a limit to the number of classes you can declare inside a single dex file, at some point in history Android apps became bigger and bigger and so Google had to adapt this format, supporting a secondary. From our perspective it doesnt matter, the tools were going to use are able to detect it and append it to the decompilation pipeline. Sometimes an app needs to execute native code, it can be an image processing library, a game engine or whatever. In such case, those. Screenshot-from-2015-09-17-183413-1024x578.png' alt='Apktool Linux' title='Apktool Linux' />ELF libraries will be found inside the libs folder, divided into architecture specific subfolders so the app will run on ARM, ARM6. META INF folder. Every Android application needs to be signed with a developer certificate in order to run on a device, even debug builds are signed by a debug certificate, the META INF folder contains information about the files inside the APK and about the developer. Inside this folder, youll usually find A MANIFEST. Dj Panel Software Free Download. MF file with the SHA 1 or SHA 2. APK. A CERT. SF file, pretty much like the MANIFEST. MF, but signed with the RSA key. A CERT. RSA file which contains the developer public key used to sign the CERT. SF file and digests. Those files are very important in order to guarantee the APK integrity and the ownership of the code. Sometimes inspecting such signature can be very handy to determine who really developed a given APK. If you want to get information about the developer, you can use the openssl command line utility openssl pkcs. META INFCERT. RSA inform DER print. Download software in the DebuggersDecompilersDisassemblers category. Android Security Research Papers. Analysis of Secure Key Storage Solutions on Android ATTACKING THE LINUX PRNG ON ANDROID Android OEMs applications insecurity. ExtractFirefoxESR.png' alt='Apktool Linux' title='Apktool Linux' />This will print an output like PKCS7. Data 1. 2. 8. 40. NULL. type pkcs. ABSENT. Number 1. 03. 94. With. RSAEncryption 1. NULL. issuer CTW, STTaiwan, LTaipei, OASUS, OUPMD, CNASUS AMAX Keyemail protected. Before Jul 8 1. 1 3. GMT. not. After Nov 2. GMT. subject CTW, STTaiwan, LTaipei, OASUS, OUPMD, CNASUS AMAX Keyemail protected. MRhzxPdYBY/U1PdTM4cYCI/AAAAAAAABO0/C4VFv3_D-us/s1600/decompile+1.png' alt='Apktool Linux' title='Apktool Linux' />Encryption 1. NULL. publickey 0 unused bits. This can be gold for us, for instance we could use this information to determine if an app was really signed by lets say Google or if it was resigned, therefore modified, by a third party. How do I get the APK of an app Now that we have a basic idea of what were supposed to find inside an APK, we need a way to actually get the APK file of the application were interested into. There are two ways, either you install it on your device and use adb to get it, or you use an online service to download it. Pulling an app with ADBFirst of all lets plug our smartphone to the USB port of our computer and get a list of the installed packages and their namespaces adb shell pm list packages. This will list all packages on your smartphone, once youve found the namespace of the package you want to reverse com. Finally, we have the APK path package systempriv appSystem. UIGoogleSystem. UIGoogle. Lets pull it from the device adb pull systempriv appSystem. UIGoogleSystem. UIGoogle. And here you go, you have the APK you want to reverse Using an Online Service.