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

Secure by design


The name says it all. Secure by design in software engineering means that software has been designed thoroughly to be secure. This can be achieved by identifying the categories, vulnerable areas and the facts to analyze. As we learned in Chapter 5, Building Attack Paths – Threat Modeling an Application, this can reduce the number of vulnerabilities. A basic design principle depends on several factors; you might want to consider the following list during the design phase:

  • Entry points: Determining all the entry points to the app in this stage can significantly identify areas that are potentially the attack surface to infect the app. This information helps us define what type of data needs to be entering the app by building APT protection mechanisms to tighten the security and also build attack trees and attack paths for all the entry points.

  • Device local storage: Storage of any data on the client side is always risky. If the app has the functionality of operating offline...