The Android Debug Bridge (adb) is a command line tool for interacting with a connected device, either through USB, over the network, or an emulator. The only requirement is the device does need to be rooted.
This is a list of commands/processes I’ve found useful within a security testing scope.
The nice thing about adb is that if you only have one device plugged in, it will automatically select it for use. To check which devices are recognized:
adb devices -l
To use a network device, you need the IP address of the device, then run:
adb connect (ip address of device)
First, you need to find the indentifier using:
adb devices -l
Any time you want to send a command, you’ll need to specifiy with the s flag:
adb -s (device id) (command)
You need two pieces of info for this: The name of the package and the Process ID. To find the package name, list all packages (bit of a tip, you can add a “-3” flag at the end of this command to have it list only 3rd party packages instead of everything on the device):
adb shell pm list packages
When you’ve identified the package, copy the full name (com.exampleorg.exampleapp), and run the following command to get the Process ID(The app needs to be running to find the ID) :
adb shell pidof (package)
Now you can display the logs:
adb logcat | grep (pid)
I also really like to dump these logs to a file like so:
adb logcat | grep (pid) > log.txt
For this, you need the package path. You can get this by finding the package name:
adb shell pm list packages
Then using the full package name (com.someorg.someapp):
adb shell pm path com.someorg.someapp
Then to pull the APK from the device:
adb pull (path)
You can pull (or push) any file with the path being the only argument
Installing is straightforward, all you need to the path where the APK is:
adb install (path)
And to uninstall, you need the package name:
adb shell pm list packages
adb uninstall (com.someorg.someapp)