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

Attacking WebViews


A WebView is a simple mobile app element that allows web pages to be rendered within an app. Hybrid and native apps are applicable, which provides browser functionality within the app. It started with Webkit (www.webkit.org) and later, post Android 4.4 KitKat, moved on to Chromium (www.chromium.org).

The CVE-2012-6636 vulnerability, in which attackers are able to inject malicious JavaScript into the app and take control of the device, has created sleepless nights for developers.

The difference between WebView and a web browser is that WebView runs within the context of a mobile app that is embedded. All the attacks on browsers are applicable to WebView.

Let's now create a scenario of an attacker's hosted website sending a malicious link inside WebView to the user of an app, similar to the cross-site scripting attack, and the attacker is able to inject the code into the WebView and execute the JavaScript code on the device level.

We have used Metasploit (http://www.metasploit...