Android Hacker's Handbook

Introduction

Like most disciplines, information security began as a cottage industry. It is has grown organically from hobbyist pastime into a robust industry replete with executive titles, “research and development” credibility, and the ear of academia as an industry where seemingly aloof fields of study such as number theory, cryptography, natural language processing, graph theory, algorithms, and niche computer science can be applied with a great deal of industry impact. Information security is evolving into a proving ground for some of these fascinating fields of study. Nonetheless, information security (specifically “vulnerability research”) is bound to the information technology sector as a whole and therefore follows the same trends.

As we all very well know from our personal lives, mobile computing is quite obviously one of the greatest recent areas of growth in the information technology. More than ever, our lives are chaperoned by our mobile devices, much more so than the computers we leave on our desks at close of business or leave closed on our home coffee tables when we head into our offices in the morning. Unlike those devices, our mobile devices are always on, taken between these two worlds, and are hence much more valuable targets for malicious actors.

Unfortunately information security has been slower to follow suit, with only a recent shift toward the mobile space. As a predominantly “reactionary” industry, information security has been slow (at least publicly) ...