Inspecting network traffic

As we know, applications can make use of the networking services available on an Android device, and many applications are developed as frontends to cloud-based services. What this means is that understanding how it communicates with the Internet services is a very important part of the security risk profile—the collection of risks an application exposes its users and its device to.

In this recipe, I'm going to show you some novel methods that you can use to monitor network traffic directly from an Android device using the ever popular Wireshark.

Getting ready

Before we can get cracking, there are a couple of tools you will need to install both on your local machine and the Android device. Here are the tools you'll need to get:

• Wireshark: It is available for download at the Wireshark site http://www.wireshark.org, Wireshark supports both Linux/Unix and Windows machines. You should make sure this is installed on your host machine before starting. Installing...