On 17th of march, we organized our first Android Hacking event. Our participants (a mix of students, security researchers, PhD-students and Post-Docs) had to solve various Android-based challenges on different levels of complexity. Each challenge involved reverse-engineering a specific application without access to the app’s source code – similar to what malware analysts need to accomplish in their daily jobs. Inside these apps, passwords needed to be found, key checking algorithms needed to be understood, and hidden functionality had to be discovered. To accomplish this task, the participants were using different analysis techniques including debugging, decompilation, and fuzzing.

The event was not only great fun for  both the participants and the organizers, but also allowed us to provide free CodeInspect licenses for the day, to be used and tested on the challenges. We were very satisfied with the feedback we got on the tool – we’re making rapid progress towards a stable product. Stay tuned for commercial CodeInspect offerings. In the meantime, our free beta program is still running.

At almost midnight, the winners of the challenges were finally found: Andreas Wittmann, Max Weller and Daniel Magin scored best. Congratulations from the Android team @ SSE.

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