Android Device D2D: Clarify how to analyze Android special file formats

[pombredanne]

Android has many unique formats such as:

• DEX
• OAT
• ART
• ODEX
• Other binary XML formats

We need to get a good handle on what these are and how they relate to the other formats to decide aht to do with each for the analysis. Some formats may contains the same thing but with different optimizations applied. Or in some cases we may not have multiple variants.

BANG and lief may help here for sure.

• https://lief.re/doc/latest/tutorials/10_android_formats.html
• https://github.com/armijnhemel/binaryanalysis-ng/

[chinyeungli]

• DEX files contain the compiled code and resources of an Android application.
• OAT files are compiled versions of DEX files optimized for the Android Runtime (ART).
• ART is the runtime environment in Android that uses Ahead-of-Time compilation.
• ODEX files are optimized versions of DEX files used by the Dalvik Virtual Machine to improve application startup time.

In short, I think we only need to deal with .dex files