During a mobile application penetration test you have physical access to an employee's Android 8.1 handset. USB debugging is enabled, but the device is unrooted and the banking app under review is not marked as debuggable. You need to obtain the app's SQLite database located in /data/data/com.acme.bank/databases/. Which technique will let you retrieve the file without rooting or modifying the device?
Install Frida on the phone and use frida-trace to hook SQLiteOpenHelper calls, capturing the database contents during runtime.
Flash a custom recovery image to gain temporary root access, then copy the database from /data/data/com.acme.bank/databases.
Run "adb pull /data/data/com.acme.bank/databases/credentials.db" to copy the file directly from the device.
Execute "adb backup -noapk com.acme.bank", convert the resulting .ab file to a tar archive with Android Backup Extractor, and extract the database locally.
The adb backup feature can create a copy of an individual application's private data as long as the app has the default android:allowBackup="true" (common unless the developer disables it). Running "adb backup -noapk com.acme.bank" saves the data as a .ab file that can be converted to a standard tar archive with tools such as Android Backup Extractor (abe.jar). The database can then be extracted locally. Directly pulling /data/data requires root, flashing a custom recovery changes the device and violates the scenario's constraint, and using Frida to intercept SQLite calls does not provide the original database file and still requires code injection on the device. Therefore, using adb backup plus Android Backup Extractor is the only method that satisfies the requirement to retrieve the database from an unmodified, non-rooted device.
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Why is rooting required to access /data/data directly?
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How does the Android Backup Extractor work?
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What does the android:allowBackup attribute do?
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What is adb backup used for in Android?
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What is Android Backup Extractor and how does it work?
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Why can't you directly pull files from /data/data without rooting the device?
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