a recent study by gartner predicts a very significant increase in cloud usage by consumers in a few years, due in great part to the ever growing use of smartphone cameras by the average household. in this context, it could be useful to have a smartphone application that is able to upload / download digital content from a cloud provider. in this article, we will construct a basic android prototype that will allow us to plug in the windows azure cloud provider, and use the windows azure toolkit for android ( available at github ) to do all of the basic cloud operations : upload content to cloud storage, browse the storage, download or delete files in cloud storage. once those operations are implemented, we will see how to enable our android application to receive server push notifications . first things first, we need to set up a storage account in the azure cloud: a storage account comes with several options as for data management : we can keep data in blob, table or queue storage. in this article, we will use the blob storage to work with images. the storage account has a primary and secondary access key , either one of the two can be used to execute operations on the storage account. any of those keys can be regenerated if compromised. 1. preliminaries first, the prerequisites: eclipse ide for java android plugin for eclipse ( adt ) windows azure toolkit for android windows azure subscription (you can get a 90-day free trial ) a getting-started document on windows azure toolkit’s github page covers the installation procedure of all the the required software in detail. this whole project ( cloid ) is freely available at github . so here we’ll limit ourselves to presenting the most relevant code sections along with the corresponding screens. the user interface is composed of a few basic activity screens, spawned from the main screen (top center): since we use a technology not for its own sake but according to our needs, let’s start by specifying what we want: public abstract class storage { /** all providers will have accesss to context*/ protected context context; /** all providers will have accesss to sharedpreferences */ protected cloudpreferences prefs; /** all downloads from providers will be saved on sd card */ protected string download_path = "/sdcard/dcim/camera/"; /** * @throws operationexception * */ public storage(context ctx) throws operationexception { context = ctx; prefs = new cloudpreferences(ctx); } /** * @throws operationexception * */ public abstract void uploadtostorage(string file_path) throws operationexception; /** * @throws operationexception * */ public abstract void downloadfromstorage(string file_name) throws operationexception; /** * @throws operationexception * */ public abstract void browsestorage() throws operationexception; /** * @throws operationexception * */ public abstract void deleteinstorage(string file_name) throws operationexception; } the above is the contract that our cloud storage provider will satisfy. we’ll provide a mockstorage implementation that will pretend to carry out a command in order to test our ui (i.e. our scrollable items list, progress bar, exception messages, etc.), so that we can later just plug in azure storage operations. note from our activities screen above, that we can switch anytime between azure storage and mock storage with the press of the toggle button “cloud on/off” in the settings screen, saving the preferences afterward. public class mockstorage extends storage { // code here... @override public void uploadtostorage(string file_path) throws operationexception { donothingbutsleep(); //throw new operationexception( "test error message", // new throwable("reason: upload test") ); } // other methods will also do nothing but sleep... /***/ private void donothingbutsleep(){ try{ thread.sleep(5000l); } catch (interruptedexception iex){ return; } } 2. the azure toolkit the toolkit comes with a sample application called “simple”, and two library jars: access control for android.jar in the wa-toolkit-android\library\accesscontrol\bin folder azure storage for android.jar in the wa-toolkit-android\library\storage\bin folder here we will only use the latter, since we will access directly azure’s blob storage. needless to say, this is not the recommended way , since our credentials will be stored on the handset. a better approach security-wise would be to access azure storage through web services hosted on either azure or other public/private clouds. once the toolkit is ready for use, we need to think a bit about settings . using an azure blob storage only requires 3 fields: an account name , an access key , and a container for our images. the access key is quite a long string (88 characters) and is kind of a pain to type, so one way to do the setup is to configure the android res/values/strings.xml file to set the default values: ... cloid insert-access-key-here pictures ... however, because we may want to overwrite the default values above (e.g. create another container), we will also save the values on the settings screen in android’s sharedpreferences . and now, let’s implement the azurestorage class. 3. azure blob storage operations 3.1. storage initialization the azurestorage constructor gets its data from android preferences (from its superclass), then constructs a connection string used to access the storage account, creates a blob client and retrieves a reference to the container of images. if the user changed the default container “pictures” in settings, then a new (empty) one will be created with that new name. a container is any grouping of blobs under a name. no blob exists outside of a container. // package here // other imports import com.windowsazure.samples.android.storageclient.blobproperties; import com.windowsazure.samples.android.storageclient.cloudblob; import com.windowsazure.samples.android.storageclient.cloudblobclient; import com.windowsazure.samples.android.storageclient.cloudblobcontainer; import com.windowsazure.samples.android.storageclient.cloudblockblob; import com.windowsazure.samples.android.storageclient.cloudstorageaccount; public class azurestorage extends storage { private cloudblobcontainer container; / * @throws operationexception * */ public azurestorage(context ctx) throws operationexception { super(ctx); // set from prefs string acct_name = prefs.getaccountname(); string access_key = prefs.getaccesskey(); // get connection string string storageconn = "defaultendpointsprotocol=http;" + "accountname=" + acct_name + ";accountkey=" + access_key; // get cloudblobcontainer try { // retrieve storage account from storageconn cloudstorageaccount storageaccount = cloudstorageaccount.parse(conn); // create the blob client // to get reference objects for containers and blobs cloudblobclient blobclient = storageaccount.createcloudblobclient(); // retrieve reference to a previously created container container = blobclient.getcontainerreference( prefs.getcontainer() ); container.createifnotexist(); } catch (exception e) { throw new operationexception("error from initblob: " + e.getmessage(), e); } } // code... we will use that container reference cloudblobcontainer throughout our upcoming cloud operations. 3.2. uploading images we will upload a file from android’s gallery to the cloud, keeping the same filename. “screener” is just a utilities class (see github repository) that does a number of useful things, e.g. extracting a file name from its path and setting the right mime type (“image/jpeg”, “image/png”, etc.). the two kinds of blobs are page blobs and block blobs . the (very) short story is that page blobs are optimized for read & write operations, while block blobs let us upload large files efficiently. in particular we can upload multiple blocks in parallel to decrease upload time. here we are uploading a blob (gallery image) as a set of blocks. /** * @throws operationexception */ @override public void uploadtostorage(string file_path) throws operationexception { try { // create or overwrite blob with contents from a local file // use same name than in local storage cloudblockblob blob = container.getblockblobreference( screener.getnamefrompath(file_path) ); file source = new file(file_path); blob.upload( new fileinputstream(source), source.length() ); blob.getproperties().contenttype = screener.getimagemimetype(file_path); blob.uploadproperties(); } catch (exception e) { throw new operationexception("error from uploadtostorage: " + e.getmessage(), e); } } bear in mind that we are not checking if the file already exists in cloud storage. therefore we will overwrite any existing file with the same name as the one we are uploading. that is usually not desirable in production code. here’s the screen flow of the upload operation: 3.3. browsing the cloud for browsing, we store all our blobs in our container into a list of items that we will display in android as a scrollable list of image names in a subclass of android.app.listactivity . once one item in the list is clicked (“touched”) by the user, we want to display some image properties such as the image size (important when deciding to download), its mime type, and the date it was last operated upon. /** * @throws operationexception * */ @override public void browsestorage() throws operationexception{ // reset uri list for refresh - no caching item.itemlist.clear(); // loop over blobs within the container try { for (cloudblob blob : container.listblobs()) { blob.downloadattributes(); blobproperties props = blob.getproperties(); long ksize = props.length/1024; string type = props.contenttype; date lastmodified = props.lastmodified; item item = new item(blob.geturi(), blob.getname(), ksize, type, lastmodified); item.itemlist.add(item); } // end loop } catch (exception e) { throw new operationexception("error from browsestorage: " + e.getmessage(), e); } } here’s the screen flow of the browse operation. pressing on an item on the list displays its details and operations on the image, which we will look at next: 3.4. downloading images our download method is pretty straightforward. note that we are downloading to the android handset’s sd card by using download_path from the superclass. /** * @throws operationexception * */ @override public void downloadfromstorage(string file_name) throws operationexception{ try { for (cloudblob blob : container.listblobs()) { // download the item and save it to a file with the same name as arg if(blob.getname().equals(file_name)){ blob.download( new fileoutputstream(download_path + blob.getname()) ); break; } } } catch (exception e) { throw new operationexception("error from downloadfromstorage: " + e.getmessage(), e); } } and the corresponding ui flow. instead of displaying the image right after the download, we chose to include a link to the gallery (bottom of the screen) where the freshly retrieved image appears on top of the gallery’s stack of pictures: 3.5. deleting images the delete operation performed on a blob up in the cloud is also rather simple: /** * @throws operationexception */ @override public void deleteinstorage(string file_name) throws operationexception{ try { // retrieve reference to a blob named file_name cloudblockblob blob = container.getblockblobreference(file_name); // delete the blob blob.delete(); } catch (exception e) { throw new operationexception("error from deleteinstorage: " + e.getmessage(), e); } } and its associated ui screens series. note that after confirming the operation, and when deletion completes, the browsing list of items is automatically refreshed, and we can see that the image is no longer on the list of blobs in our storage container. 3.6. wrapping up the azurestorage methods are called inside a basic work thread, which will take care of all cloud operations: // called inside a thread try { // get storage instance from factory storage store = storagefactory.getstorageinstance(this, storagefactory.provider.azure_storage); // for the progress bar incrementworkcount(); // do ops switch(operation){ case upload : store.uploadtostorage(path); break; case browse : store.browsestorage(); break; case download : store.downloadfromstorage(path); // refresh gallery sendbroadcast( new intent( intent.action_media_mounted, uri.parse("file://"+ environment.getexternalstoragedirectory()) ) ); break; case delete : store.deleteinstorage(path); break; } // end switch } catch (operationexception e) { recorderror(e); } notice how we are telling the android image gallery to refresh by issuing a broadcast once a new file is downloaded from the cloud to the sd card. there are different ways to do this, but without that call, the gallery won’t show the new image before the next system scheduled media scan. again, for the full code, refer to this project on github. we are done with the basic cloud operations. all we had to do was plug in our azurestorage implementation class and get an instance of it through a factory, with minimal impact on preexisting code. 4. push notifications up to this point we have demonstrated device-initiated communication with the cloud. for cloud-initiated or push communication, the android platform uses google cloud messaging (gcm). in a previous article , i wrote about how to integrate gcm into an existing android application. here we will add a second set of settings for server push. our client code will connect with any gcm server and it will set the status on our main activity (last screen shot on the right) once the information in push preferences is correctly set. 5. conclusions the toolkit documentation is kind of sparse (which is why the community needs more articles like this). also, the sample application doesn’t cover much (maybe the reason why it’s called “simple”), and it has room for improvement. however, the library itself is fully functional, and once we figure out the api, it all works quite nicely. of course, this application is itself pretty basic and doesn’t cover lots of other features, like access control, permissions, metadata, and snapshots. but it is a start.

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Agile development has a serious Appsec problem. Most Agile development teams suck at building secure software. But one of the reasons for this is that Appsec has a serious Agile problem. Most security experts don’t understand Agile development and haven’t come to terms with the way the way that Agile teams design and build software; with the way that Agile teams think and work; and especially with the speed at which Agile teams deliver software and make decisions. The CSSLP and Agile = Epic Fail You can see this problem in (ISC)2’s Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP), which is supposed to help bridge between security and software development. The Official Guide to the CSSLP is 572 pages long. Of this, only 2 pages are spent on Agile development: ½ page each on Scrum and XP, and a couple of pictures. Otherwise, ISC2 pretends that software development is done in big formal Waterfall steps (requirements, design, coding, testing, deployment) with lots of documents to review and clear hand-offs at each of these steps where somebody from Security can step in and insert a big formal review/test before the next step can start. Most developers don’t work this way anymore, if they ever did. Appsec’s Agile Challenges It’s not clear how and when security should engage with Agile teams that are following Lean, lightweight Agile methods. How can Security keep up with projects with such short-term planning horizons, plans and priorities that change for every 1- or 2-week sprint? What about teams following Kanban and Just in Time planning and “automagical” prioritization, and Continuous Deployment in Devops, pushing each change out to customers as soon as it is developed? Where does Security fit in Scrum, or a Scrum of Scrums? What meetings do security engineers need to attend, and what roles are they supposed to play in these meetings? How much input can they / should they have on decisions? Is Security a Chicken or a Pig? How can Security know when they need to do a security review, if requirements are all captured in 1-sentence User Stories which are “too short on purpose”? How do you get security activities and requirements included in the backlog? How can Security catch and correct design and implementation decisions before it is too late if they aren't in the same room as the development team, when developers are learning and deciding on the fly what work needs to be done and how it needs to be done? When do you schedule security reviews and tests if the design and the code are always changing? When the team is continuously experimenting and trying out new ideas, new programming models, new languages and frameworks and libraries and toolchains? How do you do threat modeling on a design that is never finished? And how can you assess the design of a system for security risks if “the design is the code” and “the code is the documentation” without having to go through all of the code by hand after it has already been written? Security and compliance requires a security review for every major software release. But what if there is never a “major release”, what if the development team is releasing small changes to production 20 or 50 or 500 or 5000 times a year? It Has Already Been Decided Appsec isn’t prepared for the rapid pace that Agile teams deliver working software, often from the start of a project. Or for the fierce autonomy and independence of self-managing Whole Teams in which developers are free to decide who will do the work and how it will get done. Or for the speed at which these decisions are made. This is a different way of thinking and working from top-down, plan-driven projects. Responsibility and accountability for decisions are pushed down to the team and from there to individuals. Lots of people making lots of small decisions, quickly and often – and changing or unmaking these decisions just as quickly and just as often. The ground is always shifting, as people continuously seek out and respond to feedback and new ideas and information, adjusting and backtracking and making course corrections. Constantly changing and tuning how they work through frequent retrospection. A culture and working approach where people are encouraged to fire first and then aim, to make mistakes and embrace failure, to fail early, fail fast and fail often, as long as they keep learning. The software – and the process that the team follows to design and build and test it – is never done, never stable and therefore “never secure”. Agile Appsec: Case Studies Microsoft has taken on the problem of how to do secure Agile development with its SDL-Agile process framework. Unfortunately, it only works for Microsoft: the SDL-Agile is expensive, heavyweight, and draws extensively on the scale and capabilities of Microsoft’s massive internal organization. Two “From the Trenches” case studies at this year’s OWASP Appsec USA conference in NYC showed how other organizations are taking on the same challenges. The first case study by Chris Eng and Ryan Boyle at Veracode, a software security as a service provider (couldn't find the link at OWASP) proves how difficult it can be for Appsec to keep up with Agile development teams, even in an organization that does Appsec for a living and has deep security engineering capabilities. Veracode’s internal Appsec engineering program has continued to learn and adapt as their development organization grew to more than 100 application developers working in a dozen Scrum teams. In the early pre-Agile days, their program relied on static analysis checking (essentially eating their own dog food as they used the same platform technology that the development team was building for customers), staged manual pen testing and ad hoc consultation from the security engineering team. As the development organization grew and adopted Scrum, Security had to find new ways to work closer with development without slowing the developers down or stretching their security engineering resources too thin. Security engineers got involved in Sprint planning meetings to discover risks, identify which stories needed security reviews, and do some threat modeling. But they found that planning meetings were not the best place for technical security reviews – the security engineers had already missed a lot of design and implementation decisions that developers had already made, which forced the teams to back track or add work after the Sprint had already started, making them miss their commitments. Now security engineers work earlier with the Product Owner to look for risks and to proactively review the team’s backlog and identify candidate stories that Security will need to review and sign-off on or help the team with. In the second case study, Yair Rovek explained how at LivePerson, 200+ developers in more than 20 Scrum teams build secure software using a common set of technologies, tools and practices. Security engineering works with a central architecture team to build security into the technology platform that all of the development teams share, including custom-built developer-friendly wrappers around ESAPI and other security libraries. Security reviews and other controls are added at different points in the development cycle: Release planning (identify risks, high-level design, compliance issues), Sprint planning, coding, testing, release. LivePerson uses static analysis tools with custom rules to check that architecture conventions are followed and to alert when a developer integrates new Open Source code so that this code can be reviewed for vulnerabilities. They schedule pen tests for every major release of their software and open up their service to customer pen testing – as a result their systems are almost continuously pen tested throughout the year. The Future is going to be Faster – and Appsec will have to be too In his presentation “Application Security at DevOps Speed and Portfolio Scale” at the same OWASP Appsec conference, Jeff Williams asserted that “Our traditional techniques for doing Appsec are failing, they’re crumbling at the edges”. Appsec has to speed up, become more flexible and Agile in itself. Because the future is going to keep getting faster. Software development projects are getting smaller and simpler and more organizations are adopting Agile methods because smaller, Agile projects are less likely to fail and they get to market much faster. Devops, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment, Kanban, the Lean Startup approach of building a Minimum Viable Product quickly and getting it out for feedback, and other ideas about how to deliver more working software faster and cheaper are becoming mainstream. In order for Appsec to “push left” into the SDLC, Appsec has to change its role from assurance/auditing and compliance to proactively enabling self-service secure development. We have to stop pretending that big security reviews and stage gates at major project milestones still work (if they ever did). They need to be replaced by lightweight, in-phase, iterative and incremental preventative controls – simple cheap things that make sense to developers and that they can do as part of designing and building software. There’s still a role for pen testing and other security reviews. But not as a once-a-year annual release certification/assurance step to “prove that the system is secure” or some other fantasy. Pen tests and other reviews are just another source of feedback to the team, information that they can use to learn and adapt and improve. Security reviews need to be cheaper and scaled down, so that they fit into time boxes and so that they can be done earlier and more often. Security has to be fit into unit testing and Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and the other tight, continuous feedback loops that Agile teams rely on, using tools that don’t need to be understood and run by security experts and that fit with how developers think and work. There are a handful of organizations that are pushing Appsec further into the rapidly blurring lines between development and operations: Etsy, Netflix, and Twitter are already doing Appsec at “DevOps Speed” today, inventing new tools and ideas. The rest of Appsec has to catch up, or be left behind. BTW: If you are involved in security for your organization’s software, the SANS Institute would appreciate your insight. Please participate in the SANS Application Security Survey. The survey closes December 20.

in part one , we captured sms messages using a broadcastreceiver. in , among a set of options, we chose to pass the needed sms information (sender, message and timestamp) as a serializable 'popmessage' object from the background to the foreground alert dialog that we constructed in : in this last section, we will complete this basic application by handling the user actions through button clicks. there are two actions the user may perform: close the sms popup window once the message is read choose to respond to it using his favorite sms program. we used intents in the previous parts of this series, as asynchronous messages to pass data between components: // in our broadcastreceiver class, we're passing the // sms message pop_msg to the popsmsactivity, i.e. our ui. intent.setclass(context, popsmsactivity.class); intent.setflags(intent.flag_activity_new_task); intent.putextra("msg", pop_msg); context.startservice(intent); the above code uses an explicit intent , i.e an intent that indicates a particular class ( popsmsactivity ) to pass data to. it is basically a direct call to another component (service, activity...). but intents can also be used to send messages to the android system so that the latter can determine what course of action to take. implicit intents do not designate a specific class which should be called by the system, but the action which we would like to be performed by the system. how does android know which component(s) to call in order to perform that action? because those applications/components that can handle the action have previously registered themselves in the system. but how did they do that? the same way we did with our custom sms receiver in our application's manifest in part one of this series: by using an intent-filter , we indicated to the android system that our application was a candidate for handling the sms_received event. intent filters are how components declare their capabilities so that other components can use them. android will look at the action, data, and category of the intent as part of its intent resolution process. a given component can declare any number of intent filters, corresponding to the number of actions it can potentially handle. if a component does not have intent-filters, it can only respond to explicit intents. when there are several components that have the same intent filters, android will present the user with a list to choose from. what the smsreply() method below is doing, is asking android to bring up any mms-sms program it can find on the phone : /***/ private void smsreply(string sender, string body){ intent sendintent = new intent(intent.action_view); sendintent.putextra("address", sender); sendintent.putextra("sms_body", body); sendintent.settype("vnd.android-dir/mms-sms"); startactivity(sendintent); this.finish(); // close this activity now } this is what it looks like on the phone, once the "reply" button is clicked and the sms program (second screen) is brought up automatically to send a response: the gohome(), sweet home method called on closing the dialog, simply takes the user back to the phone home screen : /***/ private void gohome(){ intent intent = new intent(intent.action_main); intent.addcategory(intent.category_home); intent.setflags(intent.flag_activity_new_task); startactivity(intent); this.finish(); } that's it. we now have our first working version of an sms popup application, and we can start building whatever new features we might think of on top of it. here's one example of what can be done, by adding the list of phone contacts, sounds, and a settings screen. source: tony's blog .

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