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

Runtime manipulation using Cycript


An essential part of our application assessment methodology is to ensure that the application is protected during runtime. This process of tracing, profiling, and debugging the execution of an app during runtime is called Instrumentation. It includes the following, but its not limited to them:

  • Boolean bypass (jailbreak/piracy detection)

  • Local authentication bypass

  • Extracting sensitive data during runtime, such as private keys, passwords, and so on

  • Accessing hidden content by force-loading view controllers

  • Malware analysis

  • Can be utilized during any custom encryption protocol

The Bypass login method

Let's now go ahead and exploit the vulnerabilities, which include local authentication bypass in the DVIA app.

Open the app and navigate to Menu | Runtime Manipulation; you should able to see the following screenshot:

Hook up the process to Cycript, as shown in the following code snippet:

# ps -ef | grep Damn
  501 35572     1   0   0:00.00 ??         0:01.03 /var/mobile...