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

The iOS application structure


Now that we have understood the iOS security model and its permissions, we will see how all the compiled application code, resources, and application metadata required to define a complete application are zipped and signed with the developer's certificate and finally issued as an iOS app store package (iPA). The structural representation of an iOS application would typically be as shown in this diagram:

When an iPA file is opened with any archiving software such as 7-Zip, WinRAR, and so on, you can see the following:

  • Payload: This folder contains all the application data

    • Application.app: This folder contains all the following along with static images and other resources

    • App binary: This is the binary executable

    • Bundle Resources: All the resources required by the app binary are stored here

    • Embedded.mobileprovision: This file is the original provisioning file packaged with the application, and it helps the developers re-sign an iOS application without requiring...