Penetration Testing: A Survival Guide

Building DEX files from the command line

DEX files without a doubt are one of the most important parts of an Android app, which is often useful for an attacker or penetration tester. We will have to deal with DEX files a lot in the Reverse Engineering section of this book. So, let's see how these DEX files are created during the app building process. We are going to do it from the command line so that it is better understandable as we can have a close look at each step.

The following diagram shows the high level process of how .dex files are generated:

The first step is to write a simple Java program in order to start with the process. The following ...