Android Explorations

If you have been following this blog for a while, you might have noticed that there haven't been many new posts in the past few months. There are two reasons for this: me being lazy and me working on a book. The books is progressing nicely, but is still a long way from being finished, so updates will probably continue to be spotty for a while. What is this all about? The book is a continuation of my quest to understand how Android works and, as you may have guessed already, is called "Android Security Internals". That's a somewhat ambitious title, but it reflects my goal -- to present both an overview of Android's security architecture, and to show how its key components are implemented and interoperate. Meeting this goal requires starting with the most fundamental concepts such as Binder IPC, sandboxing, file ownership and permissions, and looking into key system services that bind the OS together, such as the PackageManagerService and ActivityManagerService ...