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

Storage/archive analysis


The data at rest is a very critical part of the assessment. Our usual concern remains that our application data is securely stored on our Android devices so that no one can extract data from it in the case of theft or loss. Also, an application (malicious) cannot access the data of another application (such as banking).

Our target app is FourGoats. All the app data resides in /data/data/org.owasp.goatdroid.FourGoats in an Android device. In this app folder, we can see that there is a shared_prefs folder, a database folder, and several other folders installed by the app. In the following screenshot, you can see that all the files in the shared_prefs folder of the FourGoats app are world-readable:

This means that any app that is installed on the device will have access to read these files even on non-rooted devices. Sometimes, developers also store credentials including usernames, passwords, and PIN numbers in such files, which will lead to a complete compromise of user...