Educational System for Demonstrating Remote Attacks on Android Devices

Android is one of the most popular operating systems for smartphones. It’s based on a modified version of the Linux kernel. Due to the popularity of this operating system, there have been many attackers that have tried to exploit the weaknesses of this system. In the CVE database, as of 2023, there have been over 8000 exploits discovered on different devices with the Android operating system. With every update of the operating system, Android developers try to fix the discovered bugs that lead to attacks. However, by unawareness of the average Android user, many smartphones aren’t updated to use the newest version of the Android operating system, which leads to them being targets of many attacks. Research has shown there haven’t been many attempts to implement an educational tool to inform of the different kinds of attacks on mobile devices, especially ones that focus on the specifics of the Android devices. In this paper we present a system for education that strives to focus on attacks that could happen on Android devices, with a special focus on remote attacks. This will be shown with a couple of different attack methods, that exploit different weaknesses of the Android operating system. The final product of this research is an educational tool that is ready for use in the course Advanced Network and System Security in the following semester.