Chapter 3: Reverse Engineering an Android Application

In the last two chapters, you learned about the basics of reverse engineering and looked into some of the tools used and their installation. You should now be able to create an Ubuntu-based virtual machine environment (or have already done so). Then, you learned how to install and run the reverse engineering tools listed in Chapter 2, Setting Up a Mobile App Reverse Engineering Environment Using Modern Tools (only some of the basic operation of the tools was covered, not all the features).

In this chapter, we will be covering the following:

• Android application development
• The reverse engineering of Android applications
• Extracting Java source code
• Converting .dex files to smali
• Reverse engineering and penetration testing
• Code obfuscation in Android apps