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

Encryption and decryption on the client side


Developers are often forced to create custom encryption methods due to various reasons, such as performance and efficiency issues. Broken cryptography happens mainly due to the following three reasons:

  • Using a weak, custom, or known algorithm (RC4, MD4, MD5, SHA1) that has been proven to be vulnerable for the encryption and decryption process

  • Poorly implementing strong algorithms

  • The key management process being flawed

In this section, let's go ahead and explore the insecure usage of custom encryption and its implementation. Since we downloaded the app Herd Financials, let's convert the .apk file into a .jar file using dex2jar, as shown in the following code snippet:

C:\Hackbox\A-Tools\dex2jar-2.0>d2j-dex2jar.bat "OWASP GoatDroid- Herd Financial Android App.apk"
dex2jar OWASP GoatDroid- Herd Financial Android App.apk -> .\OWASP GoatDroid- Herd Financial Android App-dex2jar.jar

The next step is to load the .jar file into JD-GUI and locate StatementDBHelper...