Build an Android Penetration Testing lab

Nowadays mobile user’s area unit increasing day by day, the protection threat is also increasing along with the expansion of its users. These threats can disrupt the operation of the smart phone, and transmit or modify user data. For these reasons, the applications deployed there should ensure privacy and integrity of the info they manage. Mobile security involves protecting personal and business information continues and transmitted from good phones, tablets, laptops and totally different mobile devices. Mobile security has become very important in mobile computing as a result of the day these days increase inside the delicate attack methods.  So, now we will see how to exploit and analyze the android application for vulnerability.

So first we have to setup an environment for android application testing.

Requirements for android penetration testing:

·         Virtual Box

·         Santoku OS which come with preinstalled SDKs.

·         GenyMotion for creating Android Virtual Device ( AVD)

·         A vulnerable android app “InsecureBankv2”.

Let’s start…

So first download Santoku OS from here. Santoku OS is built especially for Mobile penetration testing and forensic investigation. Santoku comes with pre-installed SDKs and other utilities. There is a bunch of forensic tools also like firmware flashing tools for multiple vendors, some other forensic scripts for enumerating app details, etc.

After downloading Santoku open Virtual Box and create a new virtual machine for it.

Now select RAM for Santoku VM, recommended is 786MB but I took 2GB, you can select according to your own need and click NEXT.

In this section select hard disk type as per your need or select VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk)

Here select the size of the hard disk as you wish and then create VM.

Now for installing Santoku tou our created VM right click on Santoku VM and go to settings  Storage  then select the empty disk after click on disk icon just in front of optical drive in the attribute section and then browse and select the downloaded santoku iso file and click Okay.

Finally launch that VM and after few seconds santoku boot menu will appear select “Install- start th installer directly”

Now installation process will begin, select your preferred language then click on continue after click on Install now.

Select your preferred language for the keyboard.

Now in this section name your VM and set a strong password for login access you can also chose Login automatically but it’s not a good choice

Now santoku will start copying files and installing. Now sit back and wait for few minutes after that it will restart.

Here our Santoku is installed that means our first part is completed.

 Now you can download Genymotion from here .

Basically, Genymotion is a relatively fast Android emulator which comes with pre-configured Android with OpenGL hardware acceleration suitable for application testing.

After installing Genymotion, go to https://www.genymotion.com/account/create/  and create a free account there and verify your email ID. Then come back to genymotion desktop software and login there using newly created account credentials.

Now to create an AVD click on ‘Add’ a new menu will appear where you can select android devices according to device brands and version numbers.

Select the device according to your need and click next. Then in this sections your review the configuration of android mobile device and finally create virtual device.

Now the device will start download the data and deploy the virtual android device.

Here you can see I created 2 virtual devices. Now select the devices and launch it.

Here is our Android Virtual Device.

To test our application for any kind of vulnerability we need Android SDK because in our testing phase we will be going to use ADB (Android Debugger Bridge) command line almost every time.  And Android SDK is preinstalled in Santoku OS. So, now we are going to connect santoku to our Android Virtual Device.

Fists check the IP of Android Virtual Device.

Now open command line in Santoku and type:

adb connect

You can check whether device is connected or not by typing:

adb devices

So here we can see that list is showing that 1 device connected.

And here you can also run shell to enter in android mobile by typing:

adb shell

So here creating penetration testing lab for android application is completed now stay tuned for next article on actual android app penetration testing and hacking.