Bluebox Launches Dexter to Look Into Android Code

Bluebox is a mobile security startup backed by Andreeson Horowitz and Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. The company’s Chief Scientist is well known application security expert Jeff Forristal, better known in the security community as Rain Forest Puppy. He is credited with the discovery of the SQL injection as an application attack.

Forristal’s company is now offering a free online service called, ‘Dexter’ that enables anyone to upload an Android app and then perform static analysis on it.

Android applications leverage Java, which is a major help for security research. From a code perspective, the actual Java bytecode of an Android application can be decompiled to perform static analysis.

“One of the key attributes of Java, for better or for worse, is that there is a one-to-one relationship between the original source code and the actual bytecode, “Forristal said. “Java also embeds a lot of debugging and symbol information that really allows for the recovery of the source code or at least something that closely approximates the source code.”

Read the full story at Datamation:
Do You Know What’s Inside Android App Code? Bluebox Does

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.