Chapter 5. Respect Your Users

Now that we have a clear understanding of the Android platform and application security framework and components, let's dive into the most challenging aspect of security: data protection. As I stated before, your credibility as an application developer depends on how securely you handle your users' data. Thus the name of this chapter: Respect Your Users!

This chapter forms the basis for understanding the importance and significance of securing user data. The chapter starts off with a discussion of benchmarks for assessing the security of the data and the CIA triad. Next, we take an example of our bookstore application and run it through the asset, threat, and attack scenarios. We talk about the mobile ecosystem and how different components of this ecosystem affect the security of user data. We will close with a review of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) framework for Android.