BSidesVienna 0x7e8

ART is beautiful, but it takes a lot of work
11-23, 14:45–15:15 (Europe/Vienna), Track 2 (3.1 (Kreativ))

Do you want to be a connoisseur of modern ART but always feel a bit too intimidated by it? Do you want to see the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of ART? Have you ever wondered what depths lie behind something seemingly simple?
Then this talk is for you!
The Android Runtime is powering modern Android and aims to run apps - fast, resource-conserving, and uncomplicated. The former two were apparently more important, but fortunately, the ART is part of the Android Open Source Project - which means we can look under the hood to understand better what it does for apps, what it does to apps, and what it could do for us.


Is this a security talk? Not directly, but it’s not not a security talk. It’s a fun(damentals) talk. The first step to hacking is understanding something, and the Android Runtime has a steep learning curve. This talk is an introduction to make it easier for others to explore the internals of the Android Runtime. Sharing is caring, after all.
Because the Android ecosystem is “mostly” open and documentation changes without notice under your feet, this is also a ranty talk to vent some frustration productively.
It will cover a brief history from the DalvikVM to ART and the changes under the hood. We’ll see the ART components, such as libart and dex2oat, and what code runs when the zygote starts, which spawns all app processes. We’ll also learn what compilation profiles are and how to get them (it’s free aggregated usage data, after all). Finally, the talk will showcase what the seclab.wien is working on to make the ART work for security and privacy research.

themoep.at, security scholar at TU Wien, conjurer of pretty pixels, wiggles air into sound, he/him