Deviant Ollam: Android Phones Can Do That?!?: Custom Tweaking for Power Security Users
SkyDogCon 2013

While half of all smartphones are running Android, only a small portion of their users choose to modify their phone's stock environment or attempt to perform custom tweaks to their O/S. Indeed, most people within the techy and hacker community are familiar with concepts like "rooting" or installing custom ROMs, but not everyone does that. However, SMALLER STILL is the proportion of seriously security-minded folk who dive to the deepest layers of their Android system, modifying and patching core elements in order to tweak and restrict things beyond what most people know to be possible.

Do you know that it is possible to selectively restrict permissions on an app-specific basis? How about the possibility of FAKING data that gets returned when an app attempts to interact with GPS? Spoofing your IMEI, IMSI, and SIM card data?... That's possible, too. Would you like to be able to unlock your device with a 6-digit PIN while simultaneously protecting your /data partition with a 40-character encryption passphrase?

All of this and more is possible, depending on how willing you are to delve deeply into your Android O/S and perform a series of advanced -- yet entirely understandable -- tweaks and patches. This talk is for serious power users with a strong need for well beyond the average level of mobile security. It will demonstrate a variety of tools and tweaks and get Android users thinking about just how much more they could be doing to protect themselves and their data, particularly if they routinely travel to hostile areas of the world or are subject to device confiscation.

About the Speaker

Deviant Ollam's first and strongest love has always been teaching. A graduate of the New Jersey Institute of Technology's Science, Technology, & Society program, he is always fascinated by the interplay that connects human values and social trends to developments in the technical world. While earning his BS degree at NJIT, Deviant also completed the History degree program at Rutgers University.

While paying the bills as a security auditor and penetration testing consultant with The CORE Group, Deviant is also a member of the Board of Directors of the US division of TOOOL, The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers. Every year at DEFCON and ShmooCon Deviant runs the Lockpick Village, and he has conducted physical security training sessions for Black Hat, DeepSec, ToorCon, HackCon, ShakaCon, HackInTheBox, ekoparty, AusCERT, GovCERT, CONFidence, the FBI, the NSA, DARPA, and the United States Military Academy at West Point. His favorite Amendments to the US Constitution are, in no particular order, the 1st, 2nd, 9th, & 10th.

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