Book Image

Mobile Application Penetration Testing

By : Vijay Kumar Velu
Book Image

Mobile Application Penetration Testing

By: Vijay Kumar Velu

Overview of this book

Mobile security has come a long way over the last few years. It has transitioned from "should it be done?" to "it must be done!"Alongside the growing number of devises and applications, there is also a growth in the volume of Personally identifiable information (PII), Financial Data, and much more. This data needs to be secured. This is why Pen-testing is so important to modern application developers. You need to know how to secure user data, and find vulnerabilities and loopholes in your application that might lead to security breaches. This book gives you the necessary skills to security test your mobile applications as a beginner, developer, or security practitioner. You'll start by discovering the internal components of an Android and an iOS application. Moving ahead, you'll understand the inter-process working of these applications. Then you'll set up a test environment for this application using various tools to identify the loopholes and vulnerabilities in the structure of the applications. Finally, after collecting all information about these security loop holes, we'll start securing our applications from these threats.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Mobile Application Penetration Testing
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

iOS architecture


iOS is the operating system that runs on all Apple mobile devices (iPhones, iPads, and iPods), which it shares with the Darwin foundation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)).

Unlike other major operating systems, iOS manages the hardware device and provides the technologies required to build the applications on the platform. There are a few default system apps shipped along with the devices, such as Mail, Calendar, Calculator, Phone, Safari, and so on, which are typically used by users.

It is not possible to run iOS and Mac OS X on any other hardware apart from Apple's, and it is restricted to use iOS on any other mobile device apart from Apple's for security and commercial reasons. This has paved the way for jailbreakers to find iOS jailbreak attacks, which we will discuss in the Jailbreaking section. The attack surface for applications has increased significantly, with more than 1 million applications in App Store.

The iOS architecture is layered, and...