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

Binary patching


Patching an app with malware has become very handy and easy for all Android apps with the ease of availability of tools, alternative app stores, and web hostings. We learned throughout this chapter how to assess different types of vulnerabilities; in this section, we will see the steps of how an app can be potentially decompiled and built back with backdoors:

  1. Download the app from Play Store or any marketplace to Genymotion or any real device.

  2. Decompile the app using APKTool (apktool d <anyfile.apk>).

  3. Analyze the application for strings such as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and so on, either using custom scripts or viewing it manually from the /res/ folder after decompilation.

  4. Convert the .apk file to a .jar file using dex2Jar to view the source code; for a presentable format, you can load them into JD-GUI.

  5. Change the source code or insert malicious code and then compile the file back again using APKTool (apktool b <nameofthefolder>).

  6. Sign the application using APKAnalyzer or jarsigner...